


Sirens

by psalloacappella



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Background Relationships, Cat and Mouse, Crazy Clan Shit, Drama, Everyone Has Issues, F/M, Gen, Haruno Sakura Has Issues, Haruno Sakura | Late-night Radio Show Host, Minor Canonical Character(s), Obsession, Sasuke chasing Sakura, Sexual Content, Tags added as we go deeper into this mess, Uchiha Itachi Has Issues, Uchiha Sasuke Has Issues, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:41:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 74,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24449026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psalloacappella/pseuds/psalloacappella
Summary: “So you’re his best friend.” A statement, not a question. “Crazy handsome, kind of a jerk?”❦He only knows her as the voice that accompanies him while he works overnights; it’s akin to an obsession. The night she takes a seat at the bar, their lives will never be quite the same.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Sasuke
Comments: 156
Kudos: 243





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Scratch that slow burn, think about a rollercoaster

I.

 _So what are you after —  
_ _Some kind of disaster?_

❦

Sasuke never knows the songs playing on the radio station, but it’s never been of much importance. A backdrop to the mundanity of his long nights, mild and muted cadences. 

When it flips off and her voice is on the wire, floating to him on unseen and flickering grid lines, mirroring the layout of familiar city streets, nothing else quite matters.

“It’s creepy,” his best friend always says of his obsession. “Super creepy.” 

He’s not inclined to disagree.

It gets worse. Sometimes he’s called in just to know, for an infinitesimal moment, that she’s focused on him. Never meant to do this as a habit, doesn’t know when it began or why; granted, he’s always had some antiquated, inherited habits from a family long gone. Listening to the radio is one of them. Muses, for a moment, on what his parents and brother would say if they knew what he was doing, if he was being a bit senseless. 

Remembering that they’re all gone, he shakes it from his mind and pretends that today, he’ll actually speak to her. 

“There’s this thing, you know,” Naruto always chides, “called the Internet. You could use it. People like her radio block, and I’m sure her picture is somewhere.”

Though he hardly needs a photograph to know she’s gorgeous, he’s already done that too. Always captured in shadow and oblong angles, distorted lines sketching her into groups and school clubs and parties. After a particular year she simply seems to drop off the face of the earth, vanish from the digital timeline. Likely a transplant to the saturated urban wilds; he knows what it’s like to rip up your roots and fall into a new place, mussed edges guarded by masses of others. What it’s like to run away and leave everything behind. Like him, she hails from elsewhere, from the wind.

Naruto is his childhood totem, the sunny sidekick. Together, with their parents in the ground and at the time a missing suspect for a brother, they made a pact and ran. Fell in here, in the steps of millions of others, carving out a tiny place for themselves in a vast urban jungle. Turns out, people love to drink no matter where they are, and so a bar purchased with trauma money ends up being the most stable thing they cling to, along with one another.

“Just ask her out over the radio,” Naruto says, once about every three nights they’re working, while wiping the tables, lugging cartons. “She’d probably think it’s romantic or something. Once she sees you, it’d be paradise.”

Extremely handsome, he’s always reminded. By sobers, by drunks, by old women on public transit.

“Pisses me off. They think you’re hot, and you act like a bastard.” Naruto’s accurate, perfect quips on his best friend’s behavior.

So he contemplates it every time he dials the number to the show for those small segments she does; it’s a great gig, really, to muse on esoteric topics between music sets he doesn’t remember, a sublime and soothing voice floating in the deepest parts of night. Some of her favorite ones, though, are literature, medical news, and an infinite array of seemingly useless trivia facts that probably make her a crackshot player. 

Sakura. Named after a flower, it strikes him as cliche; but then, he’s a walking one himself.

.

.

.

“Well, Kiba, was it? Getting into the merits and drawbacks of dog breeding is definitely a topic I’m sure callers could chime in on, but we’d be here all night. Though you mentioned it’s something that’s been in your family, and the part about your mother seemed to get you riled.”

“Hey, hey, are you a psychiatrist now too?”

A musical laugh, rich and warm. Sasuke wonders about this Kiba character’s screwed up family life and tips the rest of the contents of a glass down his throat. Groans a little at the heat and the way her voice sinks into his skin. Sometimes, what he does know about her floats to the surface, all details gleaned from tidbits callers tease out of her: Green eyes, not from the area, pink hair (he’s not sure of this one), always with a book. Likes sweets. And to the dismay of one Kakashi Hatake from a west side neighborhood, likes men closer to her own age but wouldn’t say no to the scar. 

_Fuck that guy_ , Sasuke growls to himself. 

But when he’s desperate, when he’s alone, he’ll call and sit there, stringing along silences from his held breaths. Sakura’s never rushed it, never makes it a joke. When he hangs up, she always invites him to call in and try again. Now that he’s done it so often, it’s impossible to admit it.

“Hey, asshole!” 

Sasuke removes a headphone from his ear and raises his eyebrows. Naruto waves both of his arms at him in chaotic windmills. “Earth to _Sasuke,_ ” he says in a slow, insulting tone. 

“What, Naruto?”

Reaching under the bar and grasping a bottle, he holds two glasses in the other hand and puts it all on the counter with the heavy, weighted sound of glass on wood. Inspecting the bottle briefly, he shrugs and unscrews the cap. “Nothing man, I’m just bored.”

Sasuke’s scowl, if possible, sinks deeper. Wants to tell him not to bother with the drink, as the shift’s almost over and it’s Tuesday and nothing important ever happens on a Tuesday, or any fucking day, really. He has street-lit sidewalks to prowl and dark corners to linger at, hoping the specter of his only living sibling drags him into the unfathomable murk and finishes him off. Better than waiting for that day, anyway. 

Handing him a glass, Naruto shakes his head. “They talkin’ about anything cool?”

Sasuke focuses on the sound in his remaining headphone, letting the muted hum of the patrons fade out. He’s fairly sure it’s still the dog guy. 

“Dog breeding and his Oedipus complex,” he responds. Twitches in irritation, something soft tickling his face and neck. 

Naruto smashes his glass against Sasuke’s, a forced toast, not waiting for a riposte. “Late night radio attracts weirdos.” His cheeky grin reveals sharp and pointed canines; in moments like these, he looks like some fox turned human by the shifts in lunar moods. “Guess that includes you.” 

.

.

.

Sometimes he wakes from nightmares, strangled in sheets and sodden with sweat. A cacophony of memories and shadows, faint carbon copies he’s buried down deep. Overlapping with a girl with pink locks and outlines of his elder brother, it all melts into grey when he takes his first gasping breath back in reality, every time like rising from the dead.

Many nights he gives up, climbs onto the fire escape outside his window with a glass of whatever’s left in his kitchen and waits for the first blushes of orange, periwinkle, rose — sunrise prompts him to switch to coffee.

Naruto always says to just come knock on his door; after all, they live across the hall from one another. He’ll sit up with him. But Sasuke knows his best friend has mercifully found a way to sleep despite his demons, and he’ll never begrudge him that luxury. 

Lately, instead, he finds himself listening to her voice float around him until the show’s close. Plays her over an old-fashioned radio, one of the few artifacts he took from his past, a vestige of a normal life before. Knotted up as he paces the floors while his obsession plays over the airwaves for hours, wishing he could bottle her up and sink into her, plush. Drown in her until he’s nothing. 

The later into the night she speaks, the edges of her words take on a throaty wobble, the caress of exhaustion and a job well done.

Finds himself thinking of her as he touches himself, in some bewildering blend of indulgence and penitence. 

Feeling complicated and disgusted when he finishes.

.

.

.

“I think for now, sir, we’ll have to agree to disagree on what the real didactic motives are in _Oresteia_ ,” she says, lacing her gentle disagreement with a kind laugh. “We’re coming at this from two opposing perspectives.” 

The man from before, Kakashi Hatake, chuckles in response. Rebuffed often but never quite conquered, he still shoots his shot. “Though this conversation could be enlightening, and more colorful, over drinks. Coffee, even; I’m not here to intimidate.” 

Unruffled, Sakura rebuffs gently. “Charming. But you’ll have to settle for my voice instead.”

“Ah, too bad. Can’t blame a man for trying, Sakura.”

“Too bad he’s three times her age,” Naruto snorts. Wiping the bar counter with a wet rag, he’s been punctuating their listening session of the show with his own stunning and apt commentary for the last hour or so. Which mostly means the literature flies over his head in a wide arc and he criticizes the creepy callers instead. Sasuke has mild appreciation for his closest friend’s defense of a woman that doesn’t belong to him, or knows he exists. 

Sasuke agrees with a quiet, “Pretentious pervert fuck.” 

“I’m sure she’s used to it.” Naruto continues cleaning. A patron gently raps a knuckle on the bar and catches the blond’s eye; he nods, acknowledging the refill request. “A voice like that, she’s bound to be pretty.”

Naruto waits for Sasuke’s retort, but he doesn’t respond. Instead busies himself with checking garnishes and avoids his eyes. 

“Oi, Sasuke. Why are you moping so much? I’m serious, I think you should call in and ask her on a date.”

“You tellin’ me this guy doesn’t have a girlfriend?” The man waiting for his refill at the bar blinks slowly at them, leaning on his elbow to prop himself up against the intoxication weighing him down. 

“No, can you believe it?”

Sasuke takes up a rag in his hand, wiping over the same counter that’s been subjected to overwrought cleanliness out of habit and boredom. Mostly, it’s to pointedly ignore them through action and mindless tasks. 

The unknown man grunts, sinking a little lower. “Sa’shame.”

“That’s what I said!” Naruto’s penchant for craving attention and having another person to ramble to other than his stoic friend blossoms, to Sasuke’s frustration. He hates when Naruto picks up strangers like strays. “He has a huge crush on the radio girl. Like, obsessed with her. Listens to her show every night it’s on.”

Filling the man’s drink generously to the brim, he flashes another toothy grin. The man taps a finger to his temple and flicks it away in a sodden, lazy salute. Raising his voice and directing it at Sasuke, he asks, “An’ you’ve never called?”

“Oh, he has.” Naruto responds for him and earns a menacing glare from his friend, who stops pretending to clean. “That’s the worst part. He’s too afraid to say anything, and she notices. She always asks him to; bet she finds weirdos interesting.”

The stranger shakes his head. “Man. You needa go for it.”

Sasuke slaps the rag on the counter with a sharp sound, mirroring his volatile expression. A glitter in his dark eyes and the hint of a flush high in his face, his frown is chiseled, foreboding. 

To Naruto: “Fuck you.” To the patron: “And she doesn’t even know who I am.” Back to Naruto: “I’m going in the back to check inventory.”

He stomps off, the back of his neck a bright red between the collar of his shirt and the roots of his dark hair. Naruto pulls out a glass for himself and gives himself an inch or two of liquor, then sighs, leans over the counter to tap his against the stranger’s.

“Sorry about him; he’s always a prickly asshole.” 

His companion waves it away with a hand, like brushing away pesky dust motes. “He’s got some pain in his eyes. I get it. So d’you.”

Naruto’s grin fades a little, hanging lopsided. Drinks instead of responding, quiet until his newfound stray points a relatively coherent finger at something over his shoulder, a grin blossoming over his own face. “When’sa last time anyone used a landline?”

Naruto twists at the waist, following the invisible line drawn in the air. “Oh, that? It’s good for deliveries and whatever, but most of the time I forget it’s there. Pretty sure it’s default for a business, right?”

“Can’t say.” The stranger shrugs and tips his glass back. “Never had’n.” 

“My only one. And cranky handles a lot of the professional stuff.”

Naruto turns his back on him and leans against the counter. Folds his arms. Stares at the landline for a full minute before seeming to settle on something, and his fox-like teeth make another appearance. Whirling back around and slapping a hand on the counter, he asks, “Can you Google something for me?”

The other man starts rummaging in his jacket for his phone to oblige. 

When Sasuke returns with a crate of fruit, he hears the stranger dictating a phone number to his idiotic friend, who punches each number in on the dusty landline. Whether he’s taking his time because he’s not quite sober enough or because he always handles the unfamiliar phone like a glass grenade, he’s embarrassed on his behalf. 

“What shit has he roped you into?” Sasuke asks the stranger, setting the crate on the counter. 

“ — 9, 9, 2,” is his response. Naruto punches the numbers in with his thumb and brings it to his ear.

“Turn the radio down.” Naruto waves his hand at Sasuke.

“Naruto— ”

Before he can complete the request, he hears his voice in two places and tones, tangling together. In front of him, clutching the landline phone, and from the speakers, which is— 

“So who do we have on the line tonight?” Sakura asks. 

Sasuke freezes, bands of anxiety crawling around his chest tightly in the way of a straightjacket, heartbeat running away from him, out of control. The timbre of her voice throws every part of him into spins; imagines her in his ear, lips speaking beautiful nonsense. 

“I’m Naruto,” Naruto says, shooting Sasuke a thumbs up. The guy drinking at the bar gives Sasuke one too; if looks could kill, they’d be carrying a body out the back door. “Naruto Uzumaki. My friend and I listen to your show sometimes. Well, he listens to it a lot.”

There he goes; rambling like a loyal pet and managing to embed himself with his sunny personality and total lack of boundaries. Sasuke jabs a finger at him and draws his hand across his neck in the universal signal to cease and desist. Naruto rolls his eyes. 

“That’s great to hear,” Sakura responds. There’s a smile in her words. Whether she’s perfected the voice of radio or means it, she has a way of making a caller feel as if they’re the only person that exists in the middle of the night. 

“Since we all work nights at about the same time, it’s like being on the same shift. Like we know each other already.”

Sasuke’s eyes widen and he mouths _What the fuck?_

A soft laugh, and now a blush surfaces in Naruto’s cheeks. Sasuke looks murderous.

“I get a lot of people calling and flirting with me on this show, Naruto.” A light warning, and she uses his name like punctuation, pointed.

“Right, right. This call isn’t really for me to talk to you, it’s to ask you a favor.”

“Depending on what that is, maybe I can help,” she says.

“The friend I mentioned, he really wants to meet you. He’s way too shy to do this on his own, so I’m calling instead. He’s my best friend, crazy handsome, kind of a jerk, and like I said, listens to your show every night.”

“Interesting. I can understand wanting to do right by your friend, but perhaps he wasn’t asking you to do _this_?”

“Heh, you’re smart. And with a voice like that, pretty too.”

Sasuke lunges for the crate.

“Anyway, he’s about to murder me, so stop by the bar off Kinzie and—oof!” Naruto blocks a projectile fruit with his forearm. 

“Is this an ad for your bar, or to vouch for your friend?”

“Can’t it be both? Gotta go!”

The second lime smacks him in the face and leaves a howling sting. Slamming the phone back on the wall, Naruto erupts in hysterical laughter.

“You’re fucking welcome.”

Another lime bounces off his forehead with a dull sound. Tears in his eyes from the impact, he inhales deeply to counteract what Sasuke would consider, practically, _giggles._

“Wishin’ you luck, man,” their stranger says. “You’re definitely good-looking enough.”

Naruto takes advantage of the pause in the assault to dart past Sasuke to the back, clapping him on the shoulder as he sprints by, yelling, “Right? That’s what I keep saying.”

.

. 

. 

But there are no new visitors to the bar the next night, or the night after that. Sasuke feels like he can breathe again, and adopts an even deeper, more sullen silence around Naruto. The latter, used to his stormy moods like shifts in weather, continues his amiable ribbing and moves on to other topics.

He doesn’t listen to her show those days either, restlessly trying to find other things with which to occupy himself. With memories too harrowing to revisit and the decent ones interred under mental lock and key, he manages to read, brood on the fire escape, and have nightmares entangled with a girl with pink hair he’s still never met. 

Hates how real she feels, silk draped over the skin and always in his ear, lips painting words he isn’t able to hear. A facsimile of someone he remembers from years and years ago, but then, again, he maintains a healthy skepticism of his instincts. 

After all, they never saw any of it coming.

So it stands to reason that on an average weeknight nearly a week later, when Sasuke approaches the back door of the bar and nods succinctly to Shikamaru in lieu of any proper greeting he’s been raised since birth to give, he ignores the knot in the stomach and blinks smoke away from his eyes.

Shikamaru leans against the brick wall of the alley, nursing the thousandth cigarette he’s had since promising to quit. With a dangling smirk and a bored, glazed gaze, he raises his face to the cloudless evening. “You’re going to want one too, the way he’s carrying on.”

Sasuke tilts his head and folds his arms. Resigned to hearing him out. “What do you mean?”

Another long drag; an exhale, shrouding him with chaotic ivory smoke. “He’s talking a woman to death in there; I’m surprised she hasn’t left. He’ll propose to her before the end of his shift.”

A sense, an impulse. With his hand on the handle of the door, his heartbeat kicks up the tempo and something sharp and sudden lurches in his stomach. Craving, aching, the anticipation of events weaving themselves together on a path he isn’t able, yet, to see. 

Of course, it could just be heartburn.

Leaving the door open with a few inches of space for their resident smoker, Sasuke continues inside. Eyes drawn to a stacked pile of mail on the office desk, he plucks them up and flips through in a detached attempt at responsibility as his ears pick up the irritating sounds of his best friend waffling his way through an interaction that surely will send the unlucky woman out. Charming in a boyish way, Naruto has the uncanny ability to come on too strong when he’s dazzled. 

Sasuke realizes he’s left his jacket on and is about to turn back to the office—

“Antigo-what?”

“Antigone. You know, the play.”

The sound of an empty glass hitting wood. Sasuke knows the voice like a ringing bell, vibrations in the soul. She could be reading the ingredients label of some obscure, imported cleaning product and he would follow her off a cliff, led by her siren call. And even though she’s never met him, doesn’t know him, might not even deign to look his way — 

His feet carry him forward, instinct and desire winning out over his embarrassment and reticence, because there is no damn way he will let Naruto send her back into the night without him getting a glimpse of the face that’s been driving him insane.

A sense of his destiny rushing up to meet him, the shifting season’s equinox meeting a cold snap.

“I think you’re way too smart for me,” Naruto says sheepishly. Topping off the woman’s glass, he hunts for something pretty, like a tiny umbrella, to add a flourish, and doesn’t stop staring into her eyes. They’re beryl, sharp, bright like jewels. 

Sakura tucks a strand of pink hair behind her ear, pushing her open book a little out of the way between them on the bar. With a longing look at _Antigone_ , she resolves that she’ll need to abandon her evening of reading and being left alone; he’s cute in a boyish, easy way, eyes like the ocean. Reminds her of a friend she left behind long ago.

Laughing, she reaches for the proffered drink. “You’re really shooting your shot here, huh?”

Sasuke has memories of his mother straightening his collar, looking into his eyes, and reminding him that he carries the family name in the edge of his jaw, in the proud bones of his spine. In his gaze. This accuracy pierces him, apt and deep, when he crosses the threshold and the attention is drawn to him in the way crows ready themselves to feast.

The glass slips from Sakura’s fingers when their eyes meet; its corner lands with a sharp, strident sound on the wooden bar, soaking her and Naruto and _Antigone_ with whatever sickly sweet concoction the blond had made.

A moment suspended in time: Sasuke’s aware of how stupid he must look, but she’s a faint echo of all the photos he’s ever seen and a triumphant gestalt as the pieces, the insignificant details he knows about her coalesce in a single second. Again, the urge to drown in every part of her and exist in the atoms of which she’s composed. 

Bringing thin fingers to her lips, all that comes is a flutter of a whisper. “ _Oh._ ”

Sasuke knows nothing about her, but something primitive tips his mind, a lurking instinct that she’s balanced on the point of her own kairotic moment. 

Holding one another’s gaze as if there’s never been anything before this, and nothing that came after would matter at all. 

“Your book,” Naruto says lamely, breaking the silence.

Sakura’s fingers rest lightly on the damp pages, but her eyes don’t leave Sasuke’s. If she severs the connection, the earth will throw her off this beautiful ride. 

Sasuke nods toward her book, breaking their spell. Blinking rapidly, Sakura passes the back of her hand across her cheeks as if she can dust away her blush. 

“Right, it’s fine,” she murmurs, shaking off the excess water and placing it aside. 

Again, they stare. Something in the atmosphere feels suffocating. Naruto grabs a rag from nowhere and begins to mop up the mess, feeling awkward. 

“So you’re his best friend.” A statement, not a question. “Crazy handsome, kind of a jerk?

Sasuke tries to respond, but words flit away, dry out his throat. Nods firmly, once. 

“You’re the one who calls in to the show all the time. But,” she adds, as if a thought interrupts and extends the thread, “you never speak.”

“How do you know?” 

His question comes out in a tone bred into his bones; rich, aloof, a press of demand. 

Something hungry and foreboding in her bright green eyes. “Even silence has its own sound.”

At this, he’s lost on what to say, feeling pared down to his barest vulnerabilities. Instead he says, “You need something dry.”

Glances down at herself for a moment, shirt clinging to her skin and delicate bends. Sasuke tries to keep his eyes firmly on her collarbone, staring at a single liquid drop. Ignoring the buzzing in his hands and the ache in his chest, he continues. “I live in this building. Go to the employee door.”

Sakura seems startled that he’s speaking, surprised. Naruto ducks under the counter to busy himself with nonsense, hiding a lecherous grin.

Gently closing her book, Sakura lowers her chin. The unwavering, piercing expression she gives him nearly makes Sasuke’s knees buckle, as if the decision she’s made has twisted him into knots at her behest. 

Corroborating, so accurately, his best friend’s behavioral assessment, Sasuke turns abruptly away. Glances at her over his shoulder and says only a single word:

“Come.”

It’s a full few seconds before Sakura climbs down from the stool in a daze, hurrying to the back.

Forming a fist and pressing it against his chest, Naruto lets out something like a wheeze and a laugh, a comedown from the intensity. He wonders if they’ll even make it out the door.

Before the door to the alley, still open a few inches, Sasuke deftly takes off his coat. His mannerisms signal years of familiarity with beholden chivalry, and Sakura isn’t surprised when he drapes it gently over her thin shoulders. There’s something interesting in the way he handles himself, precise and slightly formal. 

Secrets she wants to dig up, turn over in the way of stones and treasures. 

She places a hand on his face and another pulls on his shirt; the desire and impulse to undo him, lay him bare. The groan that vibrates in his throat and dances into hers as she kisses him fiercely tells her it’s a possibility. No, a promise. Hot fingers slip under fabric and burning skin, tracing the outlines of muscle with her fluttering fingertips like she can pry him open at every sinewed close. A stupid fool for men like this, hard outsides and soft centers. 

Sewing affection into every fold, forgiving them for things they’ve never said out loud.

His fingers wind themselves through her pink locks and hold her head flush to the wall as her fingers begin to make simple work of his buttons.

“Not — not here.” Like it’s ripped from his throat, a rich and dark command that leaves her dizzy. 

Her potent laugh: Like chimes, like glass shattering and plunks of pieces falling around them in a rainstorm. Sasuke pulls back, feeling the sting and bruise of their lips intertwined with the hum of every inch of his skin. Hard against her. Wondering how anything or anyone can feel so much at once without killing it at the roots. She touches him gently and without warning, and he almost abandons the attempt at politeness, trying to smother and sink the instinct to screw her against the wall and leave her a gasping mess. 

With her lips on his ear, the voice that’s been stratified through a vintage radio and the woman in front of him collide in an instant, the splitting of the atom, destruction of the fabric of the universe. 

“I’d follow you anywhere.”

Grabbing her by the wrist, he swings open the door to the alley with her in tow. Shikamaru blinks in bemusement at the sight, still leaning against the brick, the remaining stub of his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. He’s not quite sure he wants to know.

“Wait,” Sakura says, planting her feet. Rubbing her lips, smoothing out the blotches of lipstick left in a frenzied mess. “You haven’t told me your name.”

Shikamaru’s eyebrows rise nearly to the evening sky, but he says nothing. Easier to stay quiet. 

Sasuke’s fingers trail off her wrist, and his eyes glitter with the shadow she’s glimpsed. The darkness she’s eager to consume and explore. Again with his voice, a proud tone. 

“Sasuke. Uchiha Sasuke.”

Sakura doesn’t ask, right now, why he says his name that way. Another smooth stone to overturn, another layer to unravel. Something in the intelligent, coherent area of her mind thinks it sounds familiar, but it’s currently unimportant. 

“Well, Sasuke.” Her voice is edible, throaty, and carries the promise of devouring him and leaving him for dead. It unsettles him that none of that bothers him in the slightest. 

Closes the gap between them, with her hands in his shirt and her body flush against him. Lips in his ear again dripping in silk as she whispers,

“Please get me out of these.” 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> beginning lyrics courtesy of All Time Low  
> also a big fan of tragic Greek plays, gl everyone


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dark eyes take in the residual mess of her skin, the detritus of their hurricane. As the advance continues and his gaze starts at her ankles, lingers on the slope of her waist and finally reaches her eyes, he wonders again if humans can exist in a form like this.

II.

_Why do I run back to you like  
_ _I don’t mind if you fuck up my life?_

❦

  
  


It’s been a long time since he’s awakened so slowly, consciousness meandering in, lackadaisical. Calm is the first emotion, smooth and unperturbed as a vast and cloudless sky.

Sated senses. 

Doesn’t open his eyes; doesn’t want it all to shatter. Most days his mental and emotional stability feels as garish as a carnival and fragile like vintage curios, tchotchkes littered and left under a dark, abandoned bed. Carefully adorned by dust.

So he indulges the satisfied moan on his lips: Lingers in the few fantastical seconds left, because when he opens his eyes he’ll be desperately alone. The blanket draped partway over him, a last attempt at covering him up with some grace. Sheets, cold. A pillow missing from underneath his head while mussed scents of fruit and warm skin let him sink into a reality unfamiliar. The stale wisps of sweat from hours ago. 

A sting on areas of his exposed skin, tiny fissures open to the air. 

So when he opens his eyes, rolling onto his side and sees her long pink locks, fluffed from their tryst and winding down her back in patterns on the sheets, like some nymph fairy or forest creature, the _fuck!_ that bursts from his lips is genuine.

He closes his eyes again, resisting the urge to curl up and writhe like burning paper and die, there, miserably in his bed. Opens them.

She’s still there. The essence of a sculpture, the embodiment of the million reasons no one should ever get close enough to touch. Now he feels the air cosseting what he understands are scratches and realizes he must be on the set of a goddamn soap opera or groping around in a dream _or_ being pranked by his best friend because there is just no way—

But her sleepy sound ruins him, a sweet exhale floating to him softly. Adjusting her hip, she sinks into a more comfortable dip in the mattress and nuzzles into the pillows — which, it hits him, she has three and two are his. The curve of her hip draws his gaze, and as his eyes follow the devastating slope of her waist, he has the urge to bury his face into every warm crevasse she’ll offer. Her face is one thing, gorgeous to be sure, but he would don armor and launch a thousand ships to ardently defend the waning gibbous mosaic of her spinal column. 

Taking a strand of pink hair in his fingers, he wonders and worries in one breath if he’s finally joined the ranks of the clinically insane. He never does this; well he has, but not as a habit. Not in a way that’s ever meant or implied anything to the other side of the equation. Gone before the sun is up, if not immediately after the necessary. This feels vulnerable, bewildering. Muscles aching, scratches stinging; he reaches for, but doesn’t touch, the purple-brushed ovoid imprint in a dip above the curve of her ass. 

He’s sure he’s never been so thoroughly used and loved as one and the same. 

They lie there — the remnants of a shipwreck. 

“The fuck do I do?” Groans again when he realizes he’s whispered it aloud. Sakura doesn’t stir. 

He thinks about texting Naruto, then squashes the idea immediately and self-diagnoses post-coital brain damage. His friend wouldn’t know what to do with this caliber of woman . . . ever. Period. Remembers the previous night, memories sapped in a cloying haze, wanting to press his rapidly stiffening cock against her and wrest her from sleep, bring her to the surface just so he can drown in her one more time, but just as quickly realizes — he’s terrified of what she does to him.

She’s not of this earth. She bends him easily, leaves him in tatters. A word for her he’s not able to grasp, can’t seem to pluck out of the ether, but it’s on the tip of his tongue. 

Sakura makes another sleepy noise, a bluster and a groan, and yanks the sheet over the rest of her, blanketing pale skin and gooseflesh. A quiet _hmph!_ like an admonishment, as if she can hear his thoughts. 

Gently sliding out of bed, grasping around for clothes; he realizes they’re everywhere, his and hers littered at all parts of their journey. Pulling on a pair of pants, exhaling roughly at the fabric gliding over him like it’s personally done him wrong, he figures coffee, at least, is the most inoffensive gesture he can think to offer.

.

.

.

She’s awakened in a few beds that don’t belong to her, but the warmth and comfort of this one is particularly intoxicating. Mind buzzing as her body lags behind, slow to wake, questions of thread counts float in the haze. Must be high, because Sakura’s never been intimate with sheets quite like these. 

A moment crystallizes; she remembers who she’s met and how she’s ended up here. The aftermath of their story has a masculine, earthy smell: A sharp sting of something like sandalwood against a muted foundation of sleep, skin, and salt. Green eyes snap open quickly and when she sees he isn’t there, she lets out a groan of relief and presses the heels of her hands against them. 

_Shit_ she hisses, barely verbalized. Sitting up with those luxurious sheets pooling around her, the way that only someone taking the time to tuck another person in would yield. When she surveys the room in full, eyes darting to individual pieces informing the whole — clothing dropped in haste, small knick-knacks from the side table abandoned on the floor, and, sweeping her hand underneath the pillows and sheets, a missing cell phone — she rolls her eyes to the ceiling and buries her face into her knees.

“Can I die now?” she asks out loud, beseeching no one. The only answers she receives are noises coming from what she presumes is the kitchen (after all, she didn’t fucking _look_ when she stumbled in last night and they were unwrapping and opening one another, presents on a holiday), and he’s probably trying to make her something to eat without knowing if she has any allergies or a last name. A growl in her stomach makes itself known, and so does the craving for coffee when the smell starts wafting through the door.

Slaps her palms to her cheeks. _Get away from him. You will ruin him, what are you thinking—?_

Sliding to the floor, she kneels and looks under the bed for her phone. Nope. Not in the drawer of the table or tangled in the sheets, and she starts lifting pieces of clothing and gathering them frantically in her arms to clear the area. When she spies it facedown on the floor, she drops everything and scrambles to it on hands and knees. Of course, it’s heavy and cold from several hours of being off and pathetically dead. 

_Here’s why you didn’t finish pre-med, Sakura: You’re dumb. Exhibit A, dead phone in a stranger’s home._

Feeling like she’s narrating her own hot mess of a life for a rapt audience, she continues her trek on hands and knees to the trash basket sitting politely in a corner, out of the way; at least he’s not a complete sham of a well-raised man, and her suspicions of his background manifest in the expensive but understated items in his room, far nicer than she’s ever had the pleasure of using. She snorts at the hypocrisy of her judgment, but as she grabs the basket and digs through it with intent, her vindication reigns. A sigh of relief. _At least you didn’t muck up that part. No surprises._

Still, she takes stock. A dead phone in a handsome stranger’s home in an unfamiliar neighborhood and now she’s here the next morning like some idiotic, pining lover in a terrible direct to television film. 

It’s terrible because she likes him; it’s the worst because she’s sure he likes her too. 

Getting to her feet, she plucks at clothes here and there trying to find what she arrived with. Pants, she finds. Shirt, she does not. In a selfish moment, she snatches one that she can identify as his in milliseconds; the heavier fabric, the rich weight of expense. Too big for her, but a consolation prize for her poor soul because in her heart she knows she’ll never meet another man that can treat a woman this well again. 

She alights on a thought and searches for a mirror, though there’s not one in here. Discovering the closed bathroom door, she hurries in and flips the lights and coughs loudly, eyes wide as she looks over her shoulder at her back. An intimate constellation, a feral tryst. With some satisfaction, she imagines the canvas of his skin and is only sorry she won’t be able to see it. That she won’t be able to twist him in knots and leave him a mess again. 

Pulling his shirt over her head, she pockets her phone while heading to the window, determined to extricate herself from this mistake. Opens the curtains and throws the room into full daylight, the aftermath of them and their choices in bright relief. Everything bare and dashed on the rocks, a shipwreck. 

There — a lock. It’s well-worn and emits no sound as she undoes the latch. Wondering savagely if he’s had a parade through here, she opens the window and starts maneuvering the flimsy screen screws. Popping out the screen, she hesitates, then leans it against the brick outside wall, supported by the black iron fire escape that’s facilitating her getaway. It’s not the first time.

Patting herself to confirm she’s in possession of her phone, it’s too late she realizes she has no shoes. No matter. Cabs still work in this city, and that’ll be her only option with no way to call a rideshare. Clambering over the sill, she pauses in a low crouch to admire the brilliant view. Tangles of telecom wires and invisible airwaves, an entity that swallows the meek and hiding whole. But do cabs let you in without shoes? 

A warm, strong hand grabs her wrist, same as last night. The urge to say let go is smothered quickly by the desire to let him take her, let him drag her back in, her tackling him like an animal finally succeeding in its kill. Green, bright eyes meet glittering charcoal, and the way he looks so effortlessly attractive, shirtless and cut and by god, so _indignant_ at her climbing out of his fire escape — the heat that settles low in her body could catch fire at the strike of a match. 

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“You look ridiculous.”

It takes her aback, how brazen he is. His friend was apt in his assessment. “Ex _cuse_ me?”

Pauses, eyes dropping to linger on her shirt, _his_ shirt, and rising to meet hers again. Another wave hits her, low and slow, desire with an aggression that’s almost frustrating. She swears he’s not of this earth. 

“Well,” she sputters, “I’m in _your_ clothes, so. And I have to go. This is so much more embarrassing than I expected.”

Affronted, he pulls her a little closer. Looks away, casting about for the right words. “Listen, I don’t do this often. This isn’t a habit for me.” 

“Sure, me either.”

A mordant tinge lingers in her response, enough that he’s not sure how he’s meant to take it. Inhaling and exhaling for a full moment (which she deduces he’s learned in some form of therapy), he says, “Your phone is dead, and you’re hungry. We were safe. And you can’t climb out of my window in broad daylight with no shoes.”

“Says who? Neighborhood watch?”

“This is a city. It’s midday. People can see you.”

“Call me a cab, then.”

“I will if that’s what you want.”

She pauses, lips pursed. Because it isn’t and she doesn’t know why she can’t just be nice. 

“Come.” Voice rich and low, such a fine texture. Fingers loosening on her wrist. He’s still speaking, but everything after he says that is a jazzy blur because she’s lost in thinking about how she did, more than once. 

“What?” 

He still looks haughty, but there’s a smirk settling into the corner of his mouth. “I said, come and have coffee.”

Resistance gone, she takes his hand so he can help her off the fire escape and back into the apartment. Firm and hot, like all of him, at odds with his chilly personality. Standing on the tips of her toes, she kisses him on the lips _on the cheek you idiot!_ and flounces away, the sleeves of his shirt drowning her wrists and hands. 

The fire in his face burns like old coals overturned; uncovered, simmering and smoldering for years.

They manage to have the first cup of coffee in absolutely stunned and awkward silence. She doesn’t bring up that he’s prepared it exactly as she likes and isn’t ready to process that information, how long he’s been listening to her show, what she’s said that he’s filed away for use. In contrast, he’s sitting rigid in a way that betrays he hasn’t had a woman sit at his kitchen table for many moons. As the minutes tick by, though, it softens, and they approach something akin to a companionable occupation of the same space. 

He breaks the silence with his question, like it’s torn from him and hurts to formulate. For someone so handsome, in moments he can be so awkward. “Would you like something to eat?”

She tilts her head in genuine surprise. Something in him flutters, frenzied and obsessive. A small smile, and she raises her eyes to his. 

“If you’re really offering. I don’t want to overstay my welcome.” Tapping her fingernails on the ceramic mug, she continues staring at him, through him the way of chipping at a sculpture. Pieces of him falling away, digging at the core. “Can I ask one favor, though? My only ask?”

He nods once, reflecting that he’s not sure he could ever say no to a request from lips like those.

“I live across the city, you see,” she says tentatively. “I work tonight, so if it’s possible, I’d like to use your shower?”

Only now does her gaze skitter away, red high in her cheeks. Without responding, he rises from the table and disappears into a part of the apartment she hasn’t yet seen. Before he turns the corner, she can see the canvas of his back, still fresh with the trenches wrought by her fingernails. He returns quickly with two towels, considerately including one for her hair. She almost hates his thoughtfulness; she can’t sink into his life like this. 

She’s always known she’s something tragic, someone who manifests and pulls chaos into her orbit. As she took her first breath she was graced with a name signaling her transience on this earth, bypassing the idea of endurance and crashing into the overcorrection. What type of mother lays that destiny at a daughter’s feet? But it’s not her fault, either, just her fate that’s been a ringing in her bones every day she’s lived. 

Sasuke places them in her waiting arms. Something draws his gaze: His shirt has slipped over her shoulder and reveals a meshy, wine-shaded love bite on her collarbone. 

Feeling more vulnerable than she likes, as if he can see the fated visions in her eyes, she brushes past him. 

They wonder if they can untangle from one another, or if they even want to.

.

.

.

Sakura hears the jangling of keys in a door, and doesn’t think much of it; perhaps he stepped out to find ingredients for breakfast. Wrapping herself in one soft towel and her hair in another, she again marvels on how nice everything in his home feels, ergonomic and crafted with opulence in mind. An invisible divide between the privileged and the poor. His choice to live above a bar in an average apartment, though, knots a wrinkle in her brain, piques her curiosity. 

The footsteps hit different, and she freezes. Adrenaline dropping into limbs from open floodgates. Opening the shower room door without a sound, she silently drips down the hallway toward the intruder, musing that this would be a terrible, tragic, and stupid way to die. Unable to find anything that can function as a makeshift weapon, she squares her jaw and steals across the wood floor in pursuit.

Sasuke’s standing at the stove idly managing omelettes when he hears it: A shriek and a slap, low in pitch, and the sound of something colliding with the wall. Cursing and fragments of sentences dancing in anger.

He’s there in a flash to take in the scene, but it’s not as he expects. Naruto bent at the waist with his hands over his face, cowering while Sakura clutches the towel around herself, dripping and livid. Pink hair long and wild, embarrassment starts to creep into her expression.

“I’m sorry! I heard footsteps that didn’t sound like yours. I didn’t — he didn’t—”

“I jus’ was going to borrow—”

“Naruto,” Sasuke says sharply, “I’ve told you not to just wander in here. The extra key is for emergencies.”

“Defi’ emergency.” Voice sullen, he keeps one hand flush over his eye while the other one starts waving. “I didn’ know you had security in here.”

“Why are you talking like that, idiot?”

“I may have hit him in the mouth,” Sakura whispers.

“Gotta say, no one could kidnap you.” Naruto gets to his feet, rubbing his palm across his mouth and wincing as it comes away streaked with red. “Look, sorry Sakura. It’s cool if I call you that, yeah? He usually doesn’t have anyone staying overnight and honestly, no disrespect, I’m super impressed you’ve put up with him this long. What are you both looking at?”

Sasuke’s eyebrows jump high as Naruto’s hand leaves his face, revealing the red, stunning beginning formations of an eventual black eye. Sakura covers her open mouth with her fingers.

“Don’t feel bad, he’s been hit before. Trust me.” Sasuke jerks his head toward the kitchen. “Get in there and get some ice.”

“I’ll help him,” Sakura says, frowning. “Let me dress.”

She pivots, feels resistance, his rough fingers on her shoulder. 

“Sakura.”

She recognizes the glitter of curiosity, entangled with worry and something like trepidation. Does he know his eyes say volumes, more than the things that leave his lips? The only thing that separates his skin from hers is a towel whose well-woven fibers seem flimsy in the storm of whatever this is, whatever they are. Imagining herself filled to the brim by him, his hands gripping her hips again and those delicate bruises pulse, alive, wanting. 

Clinging to the last bit of the shipwreck. 

A hitch in her breath; she continues down the hall and feels his gaze somewhere between her shoulder blades. 

Little does she know he’s imagining his lips on every vertebra in her spine. 

“Dude.”

Sasuke doesn’t answer, doesn’t want to dignify him with a response.

“She’s still here. Usually they’re out with cab fare before the sun is up.”

Pouting, Sasuke slaps a bag of frozen fruit onto Naruto’s eye and ignores his _ow, shit!_

“What did she do to you?”

“Naruto—”

“Have you looked at yourself?”

Pouring three mugs of coffee from a french press, Sasuke sighs and ignores him. Leave it to his best friend to burst into his life and try to analyze it. Though come to think of it, it’s the playbook for all his pivotal and destiny-altering moments, including the girl in his shower, wearing his clothes, who apparently throws a mean right hook. The sense of unreality is starting to wear on him. 

“You look like you had a fight with a wood chipper and gave it as good as you got. And enjoyed it, somehow.”

“Fuck you.” Sasuke wishes he had put on a shirt. Too bad she’s conscripted one of his favorites. 

“I think it’s awesome. It’s about time you enjoyed something.” Squashing the malleable, melting fruit bag in his hands, he drops it back on his face with a dulcet _Ahhh!_

“Why are you here?” 

“Can’t I just hang out?”

“We ‘hang out’ all the time.”

“Welllll,” Naruto begins, and Sasuke is now sorry he’s asked. “Shikamaru is with his ‘girlfriend’ who I think doesn’t exist. He never brings her around, anyway. Get this - he said her job is designing boat sails. What? That’s not a real job.”

Adding an inordinate amount of sugar to one of the coffee mugs, he stirs it and sets it on the table in Sakura’s spot. “I can see why he doesn’t bring her around you. You’re obnoxious.”

“Well maybe he’s afraid she’ll see you and forget about him. Handsome jerk. If you mess up with this woman, I’ll scoop her up.”

Returning to the stove, Sasuke flatly responds, “You’ll have two black eyes if you try.”

When Sakura returns she winces at Naruto. Hovering a little, she starts in with a litany of advice. “If you have double vision or a headache or anything, please go see a doctor.”

Naruto grins, flashing his pointed canines. “You didn’t hit me that hard. Promise.” Sighing as he sinks into a seat, he readjusts the makeshift ice pack with another moan. Reaching for the coffee cup, he continues. “You talk about that stuff on your show sometimes. Medical news and psychology. Did you go to school for it?”

The fingernail tapping returns. Sasuke plates food and listens hard. 

“A lifetime ago, I was on a pre-med track. It didn’t work out. Now I do . . . this, I guess.”

“Don’t look embarrassed,” he says, fixing her with one bright ocean eye. “That’s way more ambition than I’ve ever had. Both of us are sort of just _here_ too; here from out East.”

She smiles softly, moves her mug to let Sasuke place a plate in front of her. Hunger roils in her stomach, hunger she’s unaware she was feeling. “Both of you? Is that where your families live?”

For the first time, Naruto pauses in his chatter, stabbing a forkful of egg. By the way Sasuke’s knuckles clench around his coffee, she suspects it’s a tactical delay. 

“We grew up together. So, our parents are — well, they’re gone. I don’t have any siblings, just one cousin who’s decent. Sasuke — ah man, do you want to explain or—”

“My parents are dead.” Sasuke says this with the flat tone of reciting a passcode or grocery list. Sakura lets the mug rest on the table, unable to hold it up. “I have an older brother.”

He lets it stop there, decides to take a bite of food. It’s a while before Sakura tries to pry. “You and your brother?”

“We don’t talk.” Clipped, the end of the discussion. She takes the hint. 

Naruto frowns at him, then hitches a grin on his face as if he can brighten the room with sheer optimistic will. 

“So how about you?”

Still grazing her fingernails against the ceramic, she musters up a small, awkward smile in response. “Unfortunately, my parents have also, erm, passed away. Though even before that, we had trouble getting along. I was a stubborn child and wanted my life to go a certain way. But some of my weaknesses led me off the path and here I am now.” 

“Siblings?”

“No. One really good friend; better than I deserve. You remind me of her, a little.”

Naruto’s eye softens around the edges, cold drops from the frozen fruit trickling from his forehead. Sasuke pushes food around his plate, not meeting her eyes. 

“Sorry,” she says hastily. “Really bringing down the mood. I didn’t mean to put you two in a position to explain.”

Naruto waves it away with a smile. Sasuke raises his eyes to hers, and she obliges, both trying to suss out the secrets of one another’s hearts in a spiraling silence as Naruto begins to shovel egg into his mouth.

“I know we all met in a weird way,” he says, speaking around his food, “but sometimes I think people are meant to meet each other. Like this, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Now, you two have met and, you know.” Waves his fork to fill in the blanks. “All thanks to me, of course.”

Sasuke’s response is a faint blush, and he falls upon his food for something to do. Sakura does the same, but not without watching him with sharp, bright beryl eyes. Depending on the angle you were graced with, ever shifting, it could be an expression of wanton desire or rapacious hunger. 

And it exists on a line so thin and imbricate. 

When everything’s cleared, when Naruto’s on his way out, he gives Sasuke a significant look, one that Sakura’s sure he’s received countless times. It’s a _don’t fuck this up_ , it’s a _don’t let her go_ admonishment that she’s familiar with herself. 

Stealing her own shoes from the entryway with a guilty look, she waits until he’s departed down the stairs and slips out Sasuke’s front door, darting to the opposite end of the hallway.

So when Sasuke’s finished with dishes and finds the door standing open, first he shakes his head and shuts it, assuming Naruto’s the culprit. It’s only as he finds everything starkly empty and echoing does he realize she’s gone. 

An unfamiliar pain in his chest leaves him with clammy hands, a hollow feeling. Her charging phone is still on his counter, flickering intently with the continuous receiving and regrouping of several messages as they flood in. The silence. Being used as a cadaver for inexperienced anatomy students may hurt less than whatever emotion is choking him now. 

A reticent knock at the door, then another slightly firmer. When he opens it and sees her standing there, it’s the last night all over again; the impulsivity to exist in her orbit, entangled so closely they can scarcely separate again. A leftover flush in her cheeks as she asks to come in, a sheaf of what looks like his mail in her hand.

“I do that sometimes - bad habit.” She says this in a voice barely above a whisper. Leans back against the door until the lock springs back into place, eyes on him like she’s pinning him up by the limbs. As she advances, he lets her pressure him back into the kitchen, thoroughly in her spell. Tossing the mail on his table with a somehow poignant _plap_ _!_ He feels the legs of a chair brush his calves and rocks on his heels as she continues, arms crossing as she grasps the hem of his shirt and removes it easily, lets it slip out of her fingers and smooth out on the cold floor, the undulating motion of a snake. “I leave without warning, without saying goodbye.”

Dark eyes take in the residual mess of her skin, the detritus of their hurricane. As the advance continues and his gaze starts at her ankles, lingers on the slope of her waist and finally reaches her eyes, he wonders again if humans can exist in a form like this. 

It’s predatory, and he braces for her lunge. Instead her thin fingers settle on his face in the ghost of the previous night, and he feeds her pieces of himself in hushed confidence. Speaking against one another’s lips. 

“I need you.”

“I know.”

“What the fuck is this?”

“Does it matter?”

Holding on by a tenuous thread, too close to drowning again with familiar strangers.

“No one’s ever done this.” An admission in a growl, low and angry. “Not to me.”

“If it makes you feel better,” she whispers, fingernails dragging lazily down his back, “I’m not used to this feeling, either.”

She kisses him again, relaxing the pace, drawing out each movement. Capturing his tongue and lips in an indolent waltz to keep him writhing at her touch. The gentle caresses of his skin turn to grips and before he can react, he’s landing hard in the chair and she’s straddling his hips and arousal tightly with the potent satisfaction of a conquering mercenary. Eyes dancing and alight with the victory. 

For a moment he sits stunned. She’s always leading, however imperceptibly. But she makes him bold, feeding a fire he’s not sure he can extinguish, anger and desire and the need to see her heart laid bare as much as she wants the inside of his.

A schism in a moment: His hand tangles in her long locks and pulls her to him roughly. Nothing gentle or forgiving in this second as he marvels, in some separate dimension, who exactly he thinks he is. As he exposes her neck to his aggressive mouth, she hums beneath him and her skin sears them both, red flush flaring up through a sieve of ivory. Skims her collarbones and breasts with the high, handsome bridge of his nose and continues his assault on her skin as his fingers tease the hem of her leggings, brush against parts of her in perilous heat. Shuddering against him when he does, a cadence of startled, stilted moans falling from her lips as music notes.

When his hands grip her hips and his fingers settle into the ghost of the wine-bruised imprints before, it tears his name from her throat. 

He fears he can’t survive another encounter. 

In her raspy, radio, twilight tone of voice, she gives him an order.

“Show me who you are.”

.

.

.

And who is he? 

Burning his mail in the kitchen sink with the panic of a hunted man. 

When he sees the return address in black and white, the name of the prison, over and over and over — 

Every time, he piles them up and destroys the evidence, clutching his chest and wondering if he’ll ever escape a tragic narrative like this. 

Because his brother always finds him, one way or another. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics, again, courtesy of All Time Low. Newish album is good album. 
> 
> So I grew up writing on a lawless internet and have trouble with the current vibe of ratings. I don't know if this reaches M or not?
> 
> We'll try to do some cute next chapter


	3. III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Who wants to speak to you so badly?” Sasuke’s voice hits her deeply, shuddering in her bones.
> 
> Bright green fingernails brush his neck, find refuge in his dark hair. “I could ask you the same.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lied I'm bad at cute

III.

_“I hear the sirens West of 8th now,  
_ _Wonder if you’re hearin’ em too._ _  
__No, you can’t be tamed, love—  
_ _And maybe I was wrong for this.”_

❦

“Don’t.”

Sleeves buried in his shirt and back exposed to the stale, dank air of the locker room, his admonishment gives Shikamaru pause. In the middle of pulling it over his head and his friend’s hand hovering in the air intent on, perhaps, touching whatever’s presenting itself as a work of art and a decimation of his skin in one.

A long, low whistle, and he withdraws. “Can I ask if this girl is human?”

“Already did,” Naruto quips, struggling with his shirt a few feet away.

Sasuke continues to dress without meeting their eyes, Naruto struggling with the correct way to put on his clothes while Shikamaru’s mind generates its own kinetic heat, rifling through a catalogue of questions and discarding each as useless. A gesture of demurring acceptance, palms out with a shrug. Sasuke runs a hand through his messy dark hair, feeling again the prickling of heat on the back of his neck.

As if all the questions he muses on have already been asked, he just says, “And you met her for the first time, that night?”

“Leave him alone, Shikamaru.” Naruto, finally fully dressed, slings his gym bag over his shoulder and claps Sasuke on the back. A quiet noise of irritation. “Oh, sorry. ‘Sides, we keep hearing about this supposed girl you have and—”

“Not a girlfriend.”

“Just a girl you spend most of your free time with, travel across town to see, won’t invite us to meet.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Sasuke mutters. Slamming the door shut and closing his with lock a sharp snap, he moves so swiftly the other two start jogging to keep up.

“You’re just cranky because no one ever impresses you; they never _get_ to you. And now you haven’t seen her for two whole days.” Naruto puts the back of his hand against his forehead, fluttering his eyelashes in the way of a movie damsel, but it elicits no reaction except an angry twitch of his lips. “You must be miserable.”

In habit, Sasuke slides his phone out of his pocket. Stomach twinges at the familiar area code, a poignant collection of numbers from his past; dialed from pay phones and friend’s houses from muscle memory, then used in a steadily improving succession of shrinking technology. Eventually, forgetting the number itself is easy and acceptable. It’s been assaulting his voicemail box and battery as of about 48 hours ago, so many notifications that they flash, regroup, and do so again. Clears them like flicking away annoying insects except the acid in his gut churns with impunity, a signal that his mind knows more than his body is willing to process. Blocking it seems like the most obvious choice. Hasn’t picked up once _because who answers unknown numbers anymore?_

Naruto keeps up a steady stream of babble about his “sweet gains” interspersed with implications that Shikamaru’s new lady friend doesn’t actually exist and even tinier, more fleeting compliments on Sakura’s attractiveness. Sasuke’s had years to perfect the art of tuning him out as they take the leisurely walk back to their bar, but he broods exactly in the way he’s expected to and it sparks his temper for reasons plentiful, not the least because yes it’s a woman and yes she’s been off the grid for two days while leaving bits and pieces of her puzzling life in his apartment and _yes_ , she undoes him and demolishes any sense of his routine. 

And the worst part is, it feels like the best mess that’s ever happened to him; fuck knows he’s had so many and they’re things he’s had to bury unfathomly deep. The calls are increasingly persistent, the letter forever burning in his heart. Alongside the girl that’s fallen into his life, windswept, gorgeous, and ushering in tumult akin to a hurricane, these things seem as though they cannot possibly coexist. 

“Uh, Sasuke?”

An uncertain tone reaches him, breaks through the haze. Habit and memory have carried them to the bar’s back door, and there at the end of the brick alley a little to the left of the entrance, she’s standing there, clasping her elbow with her hand opposite, bag strap crossing her chest. Weight teetering from one hip to the other and eyes on something far beyond reality, chin bouncing in time to beats and songs unknown. Absolutely average to any objective observer in ankle-length pants and strapped sandals and a green sweater wide on the neck, but her peeking collarbones and gentle lips mouthing lyrics which dissipate into the blessed, vivid dimension that must be her universe — well, Sasuke thinks it must be a wonderful place. 

Realizing finally that it’s Naruto who lobbed the undertone and also that he's ungracefully short-circuited, his best friend handles the interaction, waves and flashes a luminous grin. “Hey, Sakura!”

Her pink eyebrows raise and then a flash of green; just like that, the world aligns again when her eyes pass over him in slivers of seconds. Removing her headphones to rest them on her neck, she returns the smile teeth and all, raising her delicate wrist adorned with a pair of silver bracelets in a wave that undulates as the dance of a swan’s neck. Sasuke is dimly aware of Shikamaru’s eyes on him in a searching, scrutinizing way. 

They congregate at the exit in a small circle, Sakura breathlessly saying, “I realized I didn’t have your number, Sasuke; in fact all I have is the business listing for the bar!”

_Speak, speak_

Swallowing hard, once, he beats back the heat that threatens to sear his face and make him feel like a small child and this may be the first time in his life he desperately, seriously considers religion if only the wisp of a prayer will grant him the semblance of being sophisticated, or at least not such a fucking mess. 

“I left some things at your apartment—” and Shikamaru’s eyes politely avert, which is irrelevant because he’s not an idiot. Sakura breaks off with delicate lilts of laughter to cover the implications. Naruto elbows both her and Sasuke at the same time; she humors him by sticking out her tongue. Pivoting, she flashes that bright smile at the unintroduced member and says, “I don’t think we met properly the other day. I’m Sakura.”

Shikamaru nods, eyes sharp and searching nearly on the border of being impolite. Noticing, something in her bright beryl eyes responds in kind, the erecting of gates to keep out strangers. A person too close. “Right. I’m Shikamaru.”

Sasuke cuts through their small circle with purpose, and the others hear the jangling of metal keys. Unlocks it with his usual practiced and kinetic finesse, that slight fealty to the chivalrous and noble behaviors that bleed through in certain moments and lately only appear to surface around this woman unfamiliar. 

With his eyes on hers, he steps aside and says, “Come in.” 

Sakura tucks pink strands of hair behind her ear, readjusting the strap on her shoulder; trails soft pads of fingers against his strong jawline and the abrupt trigger, the connection as their eyes meet, rings with the acuteness of an unexpected spasm. Heartbeat pounding in his ears.

“Thank you, Sasuke.” Like the rustle of leaves, wafting in hot summer wind. 

His best friend gives him a stupid, redolent expression, snickering as he passes. Contrasting starkly with Shikamaru’s silence in which he raises his eyebrows but says and implies nothing of note as he files in. 

Gathered behind the bar and settling in a semicircle teetering on the edge of awkward and casual, Sakura reaches across it to hand her phone to Sasuke; why they keep ending up with such safe space between them, careful and repelling magnetic forces in a cavorting dance with firm equidistance, is a reasonable question but of course the answer is easily known to the two involved and potentially obvious to a third, while the fourth waits at the pink-haired girl’s elbow to exchange numbers next. The meticulous and vigilant orbit they do not, cannot break, because what awaits them if they stray and tumble off is that splitting of atoms, that concatenation of events so consuming. All swap and share and blithely comment on choice of wallpapers until each has fulfilled the other by modern ritual. 

Sasuke wonders if she notices the numerous missed calls.

Sakura wonders if he notices the same.

“Now we’re all just a phone call away,” Naruto says, nudging her elbow. Beaming at an uncomfortable brightness, incandescent. Shikamaru folds his arms without comment. Sakura’s eyes land on him as he does, surveying him with some inscrutable expression.

“I feel like you enjoy strategy games,” she says to him. The smile on her face, Sasuke can tell, doesn’t quite reach her eyes. Unsure if he’s ever seen her falter a little on her charm, _except how would you know, you’ve only known her for a few days._ “Chess, maybe?” 

For a tense second, perhaps a half of one, he doesn’t oblige; then his mouth relaxes into an easy smile, reflecting the Shikamaru they know can be at ease and mild in a manner bordering on lazy indifference that’s often so unfocused as to be rude. “Indeed. I prefer _shogi,_ though. Not sure how you knew that,” he finishes, with a wry smile.

Shoulders dipping a little, she releases tension of which she was unaware. “That did sound forward, didn’t it? Sorry. I know me showing up like this is a little sudden. Weird.”

“It’s fine.” Shikamaru’s response is automatic, and his arms loosely unfold and instead a hand comes to rest on his hip. “Friends of theirs are friends of mine.”

“You just strike me as someone who likes to get the measure of people first,” she says, nodding. “Sharp.” He concedes the point with his expression, a raised eyebrow and swaying nod. “Anyway. I’m sorry for leaving all my things in your apartment, it’s really not like me. I came to pick them up.”

She’s redirected her attention and the conversation back to Sasuke, who immediately wonders where he should put his hands. Being the focus of her gaze is not unlike feeling as the target in a viewfinder, and, coupled with the difficulty breathing, makes him wish they were alone. With all eyes on him, feeling as though she’s about to walk back this raucous affair, he decides to try to channel that boldness and fire she manages to stoke in his heart and mind, and other carnal parts of him, into giving her as good as he’s been getting. 

Removing the keys from his pocket again, he flips through them one at a time idly. A smirk settles in his lips — she stirs up something elemental, the ego he’s worked to tamp down to keep himself anonymous and safe in this new place he’s established as his home. The aspect of himself that when wielded pulls the attention of women, in particular, into his messy life. But his past, the narrative he’s never desired has ruined so many things, and the ache to throw caution to the wind beckons.

Locating the prize, he separates the key from the rest and unhooks it, holds it between his thumb and forefinger. When he raises his eyes to hers and they connect, again, that short circuit in the marrow, a shot of adrenaline. 

He’s pleased to see the tiny dusting of color high in her cheeks. 

“You work tonight, and still live across town.” Extending his hand, he indicates the item with a lofty gesture. 

“I do, but—”

“I won’t have you traveling that distance every night you work. I have an extra.”

“I’m imposing,” she insists. Foreboding, sharp. Blinks rapidly. 

“Nothing,” he says crisply, “that you’ve done is imposing.” 

She withholds riposte, pausing, seeming like she wants to suss out the possible sarcasm. Refusing to be outdone, she gently takes the key while the outliers watch; Naruto physically with a hand over his mouth, a paragon of subtlety.

Tossing her pink hair over her shoulder, she says, “I suppose you’ll be seeing a lot of me, then, Sasuke.” She sounds almost haughty. 

He shrugs with one shoulder, still holding her gaze. Naruto snorts, failing to pass it off as a hasty cough.

“Well, I’d better be going.” Flashing another bright grin, she spins on her heel and heads for the back exit. “Things to do. Bye Naruto; nice to meet you, Shikamaru!”

In the same doorway he crossed the threshold of a few nights before, she hovers in it, pivoting back to cast a hook with her bright eyes and long lashes and the delicate curve of her collarbone. “Although . . . I do have questions. Logistics, of course. If you could walk me out?”

Striding through their loose semi-circle, again, with a burgeoning confidence and swagger that Naruto can attest he hasn’t seen in many moons, Sasuke falls in step behind her as she departs, like a spell, as a man learning the steps of an unfamiliar dance, primed with hesitance and surrendering to a blind and stupid faith. 

Naruto bursts out laughing, the abrupt sound shattering the silence left in their departure. Practically crying, he leans back with the heel of his hand pressed to his forehead while Shikamaru eyes him warily. 

“Are you all right?”

“You don’t find this hilarious? It’s so _embarrassing_ , ugh. And the worst part is, it’s totally working for that bastard!” Wiping away tears, chest heaving, his hands land on his hips as he scoffs. “So you two are killing the game and I’m over here dying!”

Thoughtful, his companion folds his arms again and says nothing.

Facing one another again like the first night, as all the nights that follow — she shrugs her shoulders, rolls her neck and stretches, preening, some beautiful bird while his eyes follow as the lovesick mate. 

Leaning back against the brick, she regards him with a searing expression. As if there’s any other way they’ve beheld one another since their meeting has been orchestrated. Sasuke senses a delicate essence in her, always layered and wrapped with care; it strikes him that she may intuit the same in him. Smothering secrets. 

“Offering me a key like this is . . . quite bold.” A quiet admonishment laced with a benediction. “You really don’t know me well at all.”

Again, the ghost of a smirk, an imprint on his beautiful face which fades in immediate. “No, I don’t. But we want things from one another.”

Sakura raises an eyebrow. “Sure. But I told you who I am, and what I do.”

_I leave without warning, without saying goodbye._

“I don’t care about that.”

“And what about what _I_ want?” She flushes so easily, he notices. They both do, entangled in their mess. “What if I’m just here to use you? What if I don’t want anything else — I don’t want to be _known_ , or saved? And—!” Folding her arms tightly, in the way of a straightjacket, the litany of questions becomes an unraveling liability, _stop it, stop caring._ “I mean, who even _are_ you, this guy who clearly has wealth and means but hides in all of your average things and routines? And you’re incredibly, infuriatingly attractive and wanting me from afar like some stupid romantic movie and it’s just too much, don’t you think?” Hides her eyes with her forearm, embarrassed, then lets it dangle and drop. 

When she meets his eyes with that strident, piercing sense of purpose, he feels himself on strings. Powerless and led by a dormant fervor, aching for her to use him as she wishes and also to bring her to him, into his mess — at repelling odds in a chaotic cosmos.

Endlessly teetering on the edge of an indulgence.

As he closes the space between them, his forearm against the brick above her head and the high bridge of his nose against her hair, they hear it in unison, the tandem buzzing of electronics vying for attention. Neither make a move to address it.

“Who wants to speak to you so badly?” Sasuke’s voice hits her deeply, shuddering in her bones.

Bright green fingernails brush his neck, find refuge in his dark hair. “I could ask you the same.”

But they don’t enlighten the other. It’s not time.

“Sakura,” he murmurs, throat dry. Swallows hard, still speaking into her hair. “Is there someone else?”

Eyes rolling to the sky, she stifles a giggle. “No, Sasuke. Not in the way that you’re thinking. Not even close.”

Dropping a kiss on his jaw, she smiles sincerely, and the glamour and shine threatens to loosen him from the bounds of earthly gravity. 

“The next time we’re both free,” she says, “let’s do something normal. Not that this isn’t, but you know. Low pressure? I don’t think I’m ready for a date — sounds hilarious, doesn’t it, considering?”

“Whatever you want,” he says. Brushes a strand of pink hair behind her ear, leans in to capture her lips.

Placing a thin finger on them, she seems sad. “Not here,” she says quietly. “We just can’t seem to stop once we start.”

She lets it trail off him, leaving a burning in its wake. Instead takes his hand and swings around to his other side, toward the street. Holds him for a long moment, then does the same again, separating from him so gently.

“Besides,” she says, turning to go, “I can’t have you falling in love with me.”

Watching her leave, framed in the late afternoon sun as a lone figure against an urban canvas, he knows with a certainty he rarely has about anything else that he definitely, already, tragically is. 

Long after she’s disappeared, Naruto startles him out of a daze by clapping him on the shoulder. Whistles. “At least you didn’t scare her away. That was aggressive of you.”

Shaking him off, he pivots and sees them both there; his best friend bouncing slightly on the high of Sasuke’s success, Shikamaru blank and impassive. Tilting his head, the latter says, “She doesn’t seem to mind that, though.”

“So you’re going on a date?” Naruto punches Sasuke in the arm. “You must give it fucking _good_ , because there’s no way she likes your shitty personality.” 

Sasuke returns the hit, hard, ignoring Naruto’s _ow!_

“She’s interested,” Shikamaru says. Folding his arms, he sighs. “Still, you don’t really know her all that well.”

Naruto shrugs. “Who cares?” Nudging Sasuke incessantly, suggestively, he asks, “So, are you gonna give her a gift? Other than your di—”

“Don’t.” 

.

.

.

Who knows how a voice will invade?

As Sasuke lingers on his windowsill, staring out at the dusk dregs of the day, he considers that she may be easier to know through airwaves than through flesh. Pieces of her linger in places that recently were only his. Now, two coffee mugs are in his sink and she forgets to close the door to the balcony tightly and the scents of faint fruit and warm skin linger on his belongings. 

Leaning his head against the frame, his eyes wander over to the screen, which is still leaning against the building. Neither of them thought to put it back. Hanging onto the rim of a glass with his fingers, savoring the singe of liquor, he listens.

“From my perspective,” Sakura says through the radio, “love in these particular plays only serves to get the women in trouble.”

“How so?”

“Antigone’s story is that she seeks to bury her brother with respect — familial love. The root of her name is steeped in the idea of worthiness, also in the context of family. Men defend honor, but women, even in their specific capacity, are expected to be the glue to preserve it under ever-changing rules.” 

“Ah,” Kakashi concedes. “But, Haemon also suffers for this love, and ultimately commits suicide over her death.”

Sasuke truly fucking hates this older man’s vague, soft voice. Hates how often he calls in and how lively their discussions are, how delicate and hazy and sexual their interplay feels. Perhaps it’s all in his own head. It’s a quality he’s never been able to place, and it reminds him of someone in his own life that embodies it, a mystery they partly revel in. The connection he’s just created in his own head between these two men that will never know one another leaves a bitter taste on his tongue.

“That is true.” Sasuke can hear Sakura smiling. “Everyone falls to tragic love in these plays. Still, I maintain that the men hold up the hypocrisy; Creon endeavors to flaut the gods with his choices despite saying he does this to follow the rules.”

“These ideas, I feel, can exist together and be justified.”

“I don’t think we have time to unpack that one,” Sakura laughs. 

“Fair point. You have a long evening ahead with many strangers.”

“Well to let you down easy — I think I have a favorite stranger.”

Sasuke feels a nonsensical flutter of panic and anxiety, manifesting as irritation. Drains the dregs of his glass and sets it on the carpet in his room. 

“I assume that means it isn’t me? Well, can’t win them all, Sakura. But can I be frank?”

“I guess.”

“It takes a certain type of personality to do a job at night, and a quality even more specific to want to see the most vulnerable sides of others.” 

“Forgive me if I don’t take psych assessments from said strangers.”

He chuckles easily, unruffled. “Isn’t that what a host is seeking too; lonely, in the middle of the night, conversing like this? 

Avoiding an answer, she softly says, “And we’ll end it there, in time for the next music block. Thanks again.” 

Babble and words from other segments, speakers. Sighing, Sasuke eases himself back into his room, shuts and locks the window. Running a hand through his hair, he paces with a deliberateness from one end of the room to the other, lost in sifting thoughts. Switches off the old radio with a solid _click_. 

Seeing the ruined book on his dresser, he settles on a decision. Unlocks his phone and with one idle sweep, clears the missed calls. Instead hunts through his contacts for someone he’s avoided for years and partly hopes the freak has changed his number, that this won’t somehow lift the curtain on people and things he’s left in the rearview. 

His swallow is loud in the quiet left in her wake — the voice that inhabits him and brings him to the edge of this precipice. As the dial tone drones in his ear, his heartbeat flails.

Sasuke hears him answer, the raised tone at the end indicating an inquiry. Clearing his throat, he responds.

A stretching silence.

“Master Sasuke, it’s been—”

“Don’t. Call me that, I mean.”

“Charming as ever,” the voice responds. The _sss’s_ in his words always linger too long, the flickering of reptile tongues. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Looking for a book. A play, really.”

The pause that balances between them holds a hint of derision. “You call after several years to have me . . . find a book for you?”

“It’s important.”

“Really.” 

“Listen,” he snaps, temper flaring, “I need to find something specific.”

“This must be for someone else.” Voice like silk, but woven around the neck, like a threat. “You’ve never been interested in—”

“Can you do it or not?”

Always with the dramatics Sasuke remembers, his connection lets out a long-suffering sigh. Sasuke lets him dither while being distracted by something lacy and small peeking from under his pillow. Realizing, the telltale heat brushes the back of his neck as he crosses the room and drops it into the hamper. 

“Of course,” the man on the phone says, after muttering to himself for a while. Sasuke again runs his hand through his hair. 

“Good.”

.

.

.

Two days later, he nearly forgets to present her with it.

Unable to discern where she spends her time when she’s not with him and not at work (and he’s intuitive enough to know not to ask her too many questions), she arrives back at his apartment as the sun starts its languid, heliod arc toward dusk. When he opens the door in response to her knocking, it feels a bit like looking into a bright light. 

“I know, I have a key,” she says apologetically. “But this feels right.” Her smile is the equivalent of having his kneecaps broken, never knowing why her attention feels like pleasure and pain in the same vein. 

Casual, effortless: Another wide-necked sweater over white jeans, those collarbones that draw the eye. Bright beryl eyes and long hair swept over the shoulders. She’s some work of art molded in the presence of ancients, and he feels clumsy in comparison. The slopes of her ankles and calves in heeled sandals bring her closer to looking him in the eye, and he imagines him carrying her over uneven ground _or them pressing on his back, his neck—_

“I can walk in them,” she says. “Don’t worry!”

Nodding, he pulls the door shut behind him and locks it. Opening her crossbody bag, she winks and indicates the wine. 

A smirk passes his face again; it keeps happening, and he can’t stop himself. 

Every time he does, Sakura’s knees feel weak. Feels hard to breathe. She doesn’t think he knows how gorgeous he is. 

She prepares to set off down the hallway, but he catches her wrist lightly instead. Absolutely no one else in her life, if she had anyone, anyway, is able to do that, no man nor woman, but she seems to let him do things that are different, vulnerable. Intimate.

With two hands, he presents the package wrapped in paper to her, proffering. With a formal air, as though there’s a weighty ritual involved, and it piques a part of her mind again, wondering from where and whom he hails. Taking it with wavering fingers, she turns it over in her hands to assess the heft and shape. Looks at him questioningly.

“A gift.”

“I — you don’t have to get me things.”

“I wanted to replace it.”

A glint in her eyes, and she slips a bright green fingernail underneath the patterned tape. When the pads of her fingers feel the item, she seems to quiver. Raises her gaze to his again, stunned. Soft.

“How did you find another one of these?” she asks, now flattening her palm over it. The old and textured cover caressed by her hands. 

Errantly, he wishes he was that book.

“It’s old, you know. I figured when I ruined it, I wouldn’t find another one. I didn’t know there _was_ another.” She says this with the reverence of a recitation. Deftly replacing the paper around it, she hands it back to him. 

“You’re keeping it.” Winces, wishing he wouldn’t do that, sound so rough. 

“Of course,” she responds. “But if I bring it now, with my luck, I’ll spill this wine on it.”

Trying to clamp down on the amusement that threatens to show in his face, he unlocks the door and brings it inside. Now, this time, they set off. 

When she kisses him in the elevator, that gentle flutter against the edge of his jaw, he considers ripping out the entirety of the emergency system wiring and staying with her forever. 

Surreptitiously wandering the concrete sidewalks with a shared cooler mug, they share the plush taste of a dry red while their skin heats up in contrast to the cooling evening. They pass storefronts and outdoor art exhibitions; Sakura twirls through a street market laden with luscious food smells and departs with several snacks skewered on sticks. The way she presses him to eat, wafting it under his nose and daring him to say no, reminds him of people and relationships long buried. And with her, he’s loath to refuse anything.

She watches him askance, a slight more hesitant than the days before. Does he know that he’s dangerously close to undoing her with his intense eyes, the effortless attractiveness? Tall, dark, and handsome embodied; a proud and aristocratic face of which his mother must have surely been proud. Muscular in a lean way, nothing overwrought, wearing plainclothes as though he’s eager to be understated, unseen - _who does he think he’s kidding?_ Just beyond her grasp of familiarity. Makes her a little wary, as it’s much easier for her to be the one in control. With him, she doesn’t know his depths. 

When she tastes him, sipping in the imprints of his lips as they share, Sakura wonders if he’ll recover when she’s gone.

The streets widen, the crowds thin as the evening presses on and the chill descends. They speak about small, idle things despite their drunkenness, despite how close they walk with one another. Heads inclined. Wandering like lost children in a place that paints itself in dreams and disappears upon awakening. 

She leads him to an open space on the outskirts of downtown, neither park nor city-sponsored cultivation. Abandoned is the politest word for it, a wide panorama with the twinkling of expressway lights playing games of chase through the wafting of tall prairie grasses. One of the tiny places the urban jungle fails to consume. Eventually it will become housing or shopping — currently, it exists as this. She lets him go and darts through the gold stalks, scattering seeds and fluff, and he keeps an eye on the pink flash among them so as not to lose her to unseen things.

Emerging, stumbling onto a stretch of withered railroad ties as far as the eye can see. Sasuke follows close behind, head on a habitual swivel to check each direction. She giggles at him, red high and flush in her cheeks, and walks heels to toes on the track. 

“Nothing comes through here anymore. An old line.” Wobbling a little, she snorts. “Everything is transformed eventually. Surprised this is still untouched.”

She continues to follow the track and he walks alongside, ready in case she slips. She’s surprisingly steady considering how much wine they’ve gone through, and the fuzziness enveloping him is warm and billowy.

“I used to be a different person,” she says abruptly, as if resuming a conversation they began before. “When I was young, I had everything meticulously planned for my life. I knew I wanted to be a doctor. Escaping the small place I came from wasn’t a dream — it was the only way I could keep on living.” The tone of her voice leaves no room for misinterpretation. “My mother and I, especially, could not get along. After I had a,” she catches her breath, “situation with a man, everything fell apart. Looking back, I wasn’t old enough for that situation. But the damage was done, and I moved out to live with a friend. We didn’t really speak again, her and I.”

“A man?” Despite himself wanting to let her speak, he interjects. 

“I wanted to think it wasn’t a screwed up situation. But then,” she sighs, downcast, “doesn’t that happen a lot, when you’re in the middle of it? You can’t see it for what it is.”

The vision, the idea of lifting her off her sandaled feet, reigns in his mind. She doesn’t deserve to carry this, to have it resting on her shoulders and weighing her down.

“Then they passed away.” She says it simply, a fact. Like reading a label from a box. “My parents. So we had all that between us, left unresolved. It derailed me, and everything I’d worked so hard for.”

The admission buzzes, and she waits for his judgment.

He faces forward, continues walking, jaw set hard.

“Who was he?”

The question is unexpected, and she turns to look at him. “The man? Just a person. A guy who hated the family he had, too, and had a lot of expectations placed on him. Admittedly, my type, a clear weakness of mine. He didn’t — it wasn’t like _that_. Sexual. But it was unhealthy.”

He wonders what she means by a weakness, a type. If she’s referring to looks or to a quality unseen. 

Her balance fails for a moment: He puts out an arm and she latches onto it, a little _oh!_ tumbling off her lips. Resumes her trek with his support. 

“But sometimes people fall together because they’re falling apart.”

They continue, reaching toward one another on the pretense of steadiness. After a long while, he inhales deeply and then exhales slow.

“That morning,” Sasuke begins, “when I said my brother and I don’t talk, he’s — he committed a crime. He’s in prison.”

Sakura continues heel to toe, fingers wound in the back of his shirt. Listening. 

“So I’m also different than I used to be. It changed the direction of my life.”

He doesn’t elaborate, and she doesn’t press. After a minute or so, she hangs onto the fabric of his shirt, pulling him back. Placing her arms around his neck, he crouches just enough for her to leap ungracefully onto his back with an _oof!_

“Let’s head for the water,” she whispers. Voice draping over him like fine silk, long pink locks fanning across his chest and neck in waves.

So they do.

It’s been years since he’s spent so many hours in the company of another person, particularly one with such energy. She’s a match to a tinderbox, spurring him to act in all the ways he’s sworn against, the ways he’s tried to leave behind to erase the tragic family name and emerge as someone average, unseen. The urge is strong and vivid, to drape her in finery and expensive dress, bring her around on his arm and present her as _his_ , the life he had been groomed to step into. 

A slap of cold wind sears his cheeks, makes his eyes water; Sakura drains the last of the red and skip-stumbles to a nearby park trash can to dispose of the glass. Beaming, she runs back to him and takes his hand, pulls him along as though leading him on a mushroom journey, an adventure in some wonderland. Tall concrete stairs lend credence to the idea, and she steps down toward the rush of the water, sitting back and closing her eyes against the spray. As she settles in, pleasantly tipsy, he does the same. She languidly unhooks her shoes and leaves them to the side.

They exist in comfortable silence. Eventually his head ends up on her lap, feeling drunk and overheated and exhausted and rooted to the spinning earth only by her and the indiscernible push and pull of the tides. The touch of her fingers on his hair and scalp send shivers in waltzes down his spine.

“It’s sad,” she whispers, “that every year, people end up drowning here. In such a beautiful city.”

He blinks up at her slowly. She blinks also, staring out at the merciless, dark churn.

“But then, can’t you drown anywhere? A couple of inches is all it takes.”

The ends of her hair brush his face, tickling him. In spite of himself, he reaches up toward the delicate hollow of her throat. Lulled to sleep by the siren sounds of the disasters that dissipate and perish as they fall from her lips.

“Of water. Of liquor. Of sorrow.” 

When he’s kissing her fiercely in the cab not long after that, the cab she magically conjured like she’s never been put on the earth to do anything else, he drinks those words time over and time over, never slaked. 

One of their phones buzzes incessantly, vibrating with impunity. It falls out of a pocket, hits the floor of the car with a dull sound. Did they give this poor witness to their mess an address? Must’ve, as they sail through the gloom along the street grid and struggle with decorum. He’s too intoxicated for it, and her, well, she’s still some sort of oracle that he brushes his fingertips against but cannot quite possess. 

The driver politely ignores them, navigates with ease. Sasuke keeps meaning to attempt an apology, but words seem too difficult for them both. 

Flushed and bright-eyed, Sakura retrieves her phone from the cab floor and jumps out the moment they arrive, managing to land on her sandaled feet. Sasuke tosses extra bills on the center console despite already paying, waves a hand at the driver’s protests, and follows. 

Into the lobby with its seeping, fluorescent lights. They wait for the elevator and in the reflective glass of the walls see themselves reflected as debris — breathing hard, feathered with red, the marks of one another on his neck, her collarbone. When the doors sweep open they step inside and make it a few seconds after they close before they resume. Weak, tremulous, obsessed. An orbit doomed to waver endlessly, the collapse of stars.

Kissing her leaves him spinning, losing seconds and minutes on end; pliable and lush, she still fights to direct him and lead the waltz, but tonight he senses an ask, a yearning unvocalized and subtle. So he relaxes the pace of his tongue in a way that leaves her pulling at him, breathing harder, compressing her desire into coils so tight she’s sure it will be her end. Gripping his back, her other hand working between them quickly, the hollow taps of her fingernails against his belt buckle— 

(the familiar lift in his gut at the shudder of the elevator)

—he nudges her sweater off her shoulder with his nose, feeling vindicated at every new breath and sound beneath his lips. 

When his fingers reach her buttons she writhes and hums beneath him like that radio static, sound beyond the edge of human perception, knees buckling in the dangerous way that signals she’s having trouble holding herself up. She grips the bar that runs a circuit around the elevator for leverage, knuckles white. 

That divine moment, breathless, when she gasps his name. “Sasuke—!” 

He punches the emergency stop button with a closed fist. As the warning tones drone in the background and he kisses her slowly, _so_ slowly, touching her between the thighs with the intent of bringing her there and back again, 

again, 

again. 

In the back of his mind, profusely thanking the old and antiquated elevator system.

And if this is drowning, then surely it’s the only way to go. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Intro lyrics by All Time Low (just bookmark this album I suppose), "Favorite Place" ft. The Band Camino. Credit where credit is due!


	4. IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I assumed you would be picking me up from a station one day,” he says. Hates himself for the heat in his face that seems to crop up only in conversation with her.
> 
> With a wry smile, she responds, “So we’re both very lucky little delinquents.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> konoha kunoichi cameo time  
> themes of privilege and family secrets sksksks

IV.

 _Glitter and crimson, fighting the friction  
_ _What a perfect mess  
_ _Fixed on a moment just out of focus  
_ _And we can’t quite see bein’ us  
_ _Ain’t good for us_

_❦_

On the 28th day after they’ve met, she calls him from a police station.

On an unassuming Friday evening in which the bar is quite busy and all three of them are running ragged — well, Shikamaru is in the back office plodding through routine tasks even though Sasuke bestows his signature, smoldering, _get your smoking lazy ass in the front_ look, pointed and serious, which does nothing to ward off the women lingering and coiling like clingy plant tendrils, hoping for a second of his time. By mere virtue of his pretty face, he’s left to the night wolves. 

Naruto, sidetracked and distracted from bartending by a loquacious brunette with hair in two buns and blunt-cut bangs, hears it first.

Completing her drink full of gin as sharp as the flashy knives she’s rolled in with, he places an orange peel in it with a flourish and gives her a nervous, dangling half-smile. Cute, but her hobby is definitely one for someone more adventurous and decidedly not for him. Still, her grin suggests a gentler side and as he slides the cocktail to her, he reflects perhaps it’s something he can overlook.

“Thanks,” she says. “And keep it open; my friends and I just arrived.” 

“No problem,” he responds, preparing to move on to the next.

“Ah, one thing . . .” Her eyes, a color in between hazy shades of silver and hazel, beckon him closer. Naruto inclines his head and leans in to hear her against the noise.

“I have to ask, who _is_ he?”

Nods her chin at Sasuke, who hands off the next drink with the most minute, fleeting smile he can bestow, more of a movement of the head than any actual friendliness. There’s always an easy grace about him and frankly, paired with his looks, it’s infuriating to Naruto how a person can be given such tall, dark, and handsome sexuality and miserably fail to wield it.

A quiet chuckle, and he whispers, “A bastard, honestly.”

Interpreting it as a joke, she giggles. 

“Seriously, he’s just complicated. You’re welcome to try, though.”

Lifting the cocktail and pinning a napkin to the perspiring glass with her fingernails, she winks and disappears into the crowd. 

Naruto then hears what he thought he had before but shook off as his imagination — the ringing of a phone sounding not like the stock default tone of a mobile but the staid ring of importance, belonging to a lawyer’s desk or doctor’s office. Not the one in his pocket, but the one on the wall that hardly ever makes a sound and overall, hasn’t been used in any useful capacity since a month ago.

It rings longer than it should; he wonders if they have voicemail. That’s definitely a Sasuke question. He’s drawn to the unusual event and though he’s unable to put a finger on it, there’s an air of happenstance and fate. Put that way, it sounds like he’s crazy or clairvoyant. 

Frowning, he puts up a finger to the next patron crowding the bar and says, “Be right with ya.”

Sasuke of course hears it too, though he’s currently drowning in a deluge of women who likely already have drinks in their hands but are eager to talk to him longer than necessary. If the bland expressions of disinterest, slivers between each interaction, aren’t enough indication, perhaps the kind but firm manner in which he ignores the flirting and lingering touches as they connect to exchange liquor and money is; the inquiries glossed with a breezy veneer but trying to gain a foothold on what he considers inappropriate topics and details. Glaring at Naruto over his shoulder, who’s treating this unanticipated phone call with more solemnity than he’s ever offered anything else in his life, he savagely wishes he had picked it up instead if only to get away.

They meet one another’s eyes. He’s known him long enough that it betrays its importance.

Extricating himself from a woman with blue hair and a sparkling silver chin labret, he leans in close and waits for details. Naruto covers the receiver and says, “It’s her. Your girlfriend.”

“She’s not my—”

“Maybe go to the office. Sounds important.”

A sensation in his gut, dripping dread. “Transfer it,” he says impatiently.

“Ah, I don’t think I— oh!” Naruto puts the phone back to his ear, listening to Sakura speak. Realizing it’s upside-down, he fumbles it. Nodding, he says, “Sure, he’s here. Jus’ let me . . .”

Jabbing a button on it, triumphant, he’s energetic and proud like a puppy as he slaps the phone back onto the wall with gusto. Grins.

A beat. Another.

“You fucking _idiot_ ,” he snaps, yanking it back off the wall. Pointing at the correct button, Sasuke’s eyes dance with what looks like the casual threat of homicide. Slams it back so hard his friend flinches. “If you hang up on her again—”

The ring echoes in stark contrast to his fury, and he snatches it up as Naruto opens his mouth. “Yes?”

“Not how your mom taught you to answer a phone,” Naruto whispers, shaking his head. Pivoting to show him an irritated shoulder, it’s the closest equivalent to a _fuck off_ that Sasuke can give in full view of the bar. He strains to hear her over the din.

And then, there she is sounding so close. Echoes of the way her whispers curl and settle in his ear when she slips out of his bed, reverberating in the silent days that follow when she disappears on a schedule all her own. Twenty-eight days can caricature a lifetime, a narrative he can clearly see in his mind’s eye, even if she’s weaving in and out of his life and their reality for most of it. It doesn’t bother him so much as long as she returns.

The strain of her lovely voice is noticeable, tensed twine. The way people speak in crowded rooms on terse topics and desperately carve a bubble of personal space for private, intimate words.

“I’m always speaking to you in unconventional ways. Always odd and in the dead of night.” Humor painted over the tightness of her vocal cords and wavering at the end, the tremolo of an instrument approaching repose.

“Are you all right?” Sasuke brings the receiver closer. No sounds from others on her end, just a gloomy quiet and possibly shuffling paper. 

“Sure,” she says, laughing a little. A nervous skittering. “I always end up in police stations on my off nights.” 

The beat that follows skips, stalls, as if there’s a space ballooning between each begging to be filled.

“Which one? I’m coming.”

“Sasuke—”

“Are you hurt?” The way he asks this is a gentleness defying his usual prickliness, so soft. Enough that Naruto glances at him over his shoulder as he manages the throng, piqued by the whispers.

“No! No, not really. I’m not sure what’s going on. They brought me here and I was sure I’d be arrested—”

“Sakura—”

“—but I don’t think so. No handcuffs, no fingerprinting. But this officer’s definitely not sure what to do with me.”

“Don’t talk to them. Just wait.”

Before she can protest, he hangs up abruptly. To Naruto: “I have to go. She needs help.”

“Is she okay?” Naruto sends another customer off, trying to hide his worried eyes. A mark of the short catalysts required for the fascinating chemistry of bonding, of friendship. She becomes a fixture for two wandering men with the inevitably and grace of astronomic orbits crossing paths.

“Police station,” he mutters. 

Sasuke heads for the back office, not seeing Naruto’s eyes wilt even more as he goes.

Whipping open the door, he ignores the fact that Shikamaru was _absolutely_ asleep a moment before all over a scattering of ledgers and rouses him with his classic abrasion. “Get out front. I need to handle something.” To drive home the point, pulls his jacket off the hook and swings it on quickly.

“Ah, right,” Shikamaru rasps, rubbing the indented depressions and ink off his face. “Emergency?”

“Sort of,” Sasuke mumbles. Reaches into his jacket pocket and casts about, in his mind, on who he can ask to dig into a situation that hasn’t yet yielded an arrest. 

He always knows someone, though. The curse of the name.

“It’s that girl, isn’t it?”

Sasuke surveys him from the threshold, already aiming to leave. He wonders what he must look like when he thinks of her, when she’s in a room and has her beautiful hands on him, because the expression Shikamaru’s giving him is inscrutable and poignant all in one. She has the uncanny ability to splay his heart as a cadaver, pinned and primed for inspection. And it always feels that everyone understands something beyond him.

“Go,” Shikamaru says. “We’re here too, if you need us.”

He nods in response, and doesn’t bother with the zipper as he jogs down the hall to swing open the back door and depart into the night.

  
  


A well-placed phone call later, he’s at the police station front desk in an unfamiliar trendy neighborhood, asking after a girl with pink hair whose last name he doesn’t have.

“Pink, you said?” An austere expression creeps into the desk manager’s brows, sinks into her jowls; sharpness in her eyes. Clearly regarding him, and this, as ludicrous.

“Probably fake,” he volunteers. “She was brought in a couple hours ago.”

“‘Probably fake,’” the woman echoes, setting down her pen. 

Anxiety flits about in his chest, a moth stuck in a dangerous, fated tryst with lamplight. 

A door opens to the right of the front desk and an officer leans over the threshold. Serious and composed in contrast, badges gleaming. “Uchiha Sasuke?”

“Yes.” It’s a reflex, something about the way he speaks reminding him of another imposing, authoritarian presence that still lingers at the edge of his nightmares. Never quite sure if he’s relieved or regretful that he’s gone. Growing up, everything was suffused with it, the power and the name.

“She’s back here. Oh, he’s with me, no need for that,” he says to the woman. Waves a hand, blithe, sweeping away the very notion of procedure.

Sasuke follows him down a hallway expecting to be taken to holding cells, and the creeping familiar feeling settles into his shoulders. Instead, the officer sighs, yawns. They stop outside of a closed office door.

“Listen, this Sakura, your girlfriend? She’s fine. I’m apt to believe what happened, but the scene got — well, it was disorderly, let’s say that. We talked a bit and the little lady she was defending is with her, too. Once she mentioned your name, well,” and here he puts what’s intended as a fatherly hand on Sasuke’s shoulder, who glances at it surreptitiously, “I knew and respected your father. Head of your family, very _helpful_ to us over the years.”

Unable to express the fleeting, frenzied analysis that takes place as he’s speaking, the myriad implications, _defending someone, little lady, girlfriend, my father, helpful,_ and the swift undercurrent of distaste at the remembrance of his family name, how his father was a pillar rather than any sort of parent or individual, and how reputation always came first: Sasuke nods a few times and swallows everything he wants to say, instead responding, “I . . . appreciate this.”

Nodding once, satisfied presumably at staying in a dead man’s good graces by way of assisting his son, he smiles broadly. Such a contrast to the way his father ever did, who perpetually seemed sour. Still, many men can commandeer space whether with a jovial smile or the most straightforward intimidation.

They both startle as the door clicks open: Sakura in the left chair and a woman with long, luscious dark hair on the right. They exist as another illustration of contrasts — hair colors on opposite sides of spectrums saturating the drab, taupe-beige space, one’s eyes green and sharp and the other’s, soft and mottled, cream. 

There’s a spark of recognition when he glances at the unknown girl, a feminine personage and assumed offspring of a family he’s met before, perhaps as a child. Now though, nothing resonates. Instead he watches Sakura, who tucks a strand of pink hair behind her ear and meets his eyes, lips tugging into a smile despite the circumstances. 

Does she know she could get away with anything with a face like that? Sasuke’s heart skips uncomfortably, the sensation of missing a step in some stairs.

When she sits up from the chair and sways, it’s the other woman who catches her first. By the forearm, and with a butterfly-delicate touch.

“Hah, I forgot,” Sakura mutters, more to herself than them. With a weak grin at her companion, she explains, “My ankle.”

“What happened to you?” Sasuke asks. Frowning, he passes the pad of his thumb across her cheek to sweep away what he assumes is cosmetic. It smears and fades but stubbornly stays.

And he knows that color more than he’s ever wanted to.

Sakura winces. “You should see the other guy.”

“I can explain,” the officer offers. Taking a seat behind his desk with another dismal yawn, Sasuke stands behind Sakura’s chair. Heat dashes across the back of his neck in irritation, confusion; she uses his arm as leverage to lower herself into the chair, intensifying the cloying atmosphere. The other woman keeps her head down, bowed. A familiar gesture.

“The ladies here were at a popular lounge downtown, separately. From their statements, they arrived at different times and did not know one another before tonight.” Pausing, his eyes sweep between the two, offering space for contradiction or comment. He continues. “Neither were unreasonably intoxicated. Over the course of the night, miss Hyuuga here,” and that name sparks something in Sasuke’s mind, neurons seeking details, “was dealing with the unwanted attentions of an intoxicated young man. At some point, miss . . . oh, the ink is smudged. Sakura, here, approached her,” here he flips an upturned palm to indicate her — 

“Hinata,” she says quietly, inclining her head to Sasuke. 

“— concerned for her well-being around this man. He apparently had friends as well, and the situation escalated to alleged harassment. Heated words were exchanged, bystanders becoming involved, and unfortunately it progressed to this man grabbing miss Hyuuga, and, well—”

“He received a face full of gimlet,” Sakura interrupts, folding her arms. “And then my fist.”

“You _punched_ him?” Sharp, inquiring, but bewildered.

“No, with a palm to the nose. I didn’t want a broken hand.”

Sasuke’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out. The officer winces and glances at Sasuke, under the assumption perhaps that he’s already aware of her tart retorts and lives lovingly with them. 

There’s a pause, and Hinata yearns to fill the gap. “If she hadn’t been there to intervene, I don’t know how it would have gone. I truly, really appreciate what she did, even if it was, ah, unorthodox?” She smiles at Sakura, then the officer, and finally Sasuke. “Her form is quite good,” she adds, blushing furiously. 

“Look, I don’t think we’re in the business of charging anyone tonight.” The officer has both palms up now in a show of calm. 

“I asked you before, I’m not sure why you’re just letting me go,” Sakura says, sounding accusing. Folds her arms across her chest. “I understand why I’m here. I don’t know if that’s right, for nothing to be written up.”

“There’s much to be said for defense.” The tiniest air of condescending patience, a parent refusing to elaborate for a child. Redirecting his attention, he says to Hinata, “Your father will be here soon.”

The way Hinata bows her head again, bent as grass in the wind as if ready to bear difficulty, resonates with Sasuke deeply. A father whose existence was imposing and a relationship fraught with the inability to measure up. 

Sakura pulls her phone out of her shimmering shirt with two fingers, plucking it from the magical ether with a certain polite grace in front of the men, and hands it to the woman next to her. Blushing, Hinata fumbles with the latch on a small clutch in her haste to exchange numbers.

Upon finishing, Sakura asks if there’s anything for her to sign. 

“No no,” he says, again with that wave. A brushing away of rules and regulations by the mere implication of his authority. “Let your boyfriend take you home, rest that ankle.”

Pink eyebrows could brush the ceiling with how high they rise; Hinata steals a glance but doesn’t make a sound. As if relenting to the chain of events, the circumstances weaving far from the controlled loom of her own hands, Sakura’s shoulders sag and accepting Sasuke’s arm plays out as the next movement in a piece of music, an obvious outcome. 

  
  


They stand apart on the sidewalk: Him in all black from the work he hastily left, her in a shimmering shirt, barefoot, sandals in her hand. The bruised knot on her ankle matches the navy of her skirt. For a few moments, they don’t speak.

She doesn’t cry, doesn’t unravel, simply stands on the chilled sidewalk and idly swings her fingers with the sandal straps woven in them in time to an unheard rhythm. Noticing her shivering, his coat becomes hers once more, draped over her shoulders and covering the spatters of red and an abundance of glitter inherited from the lounge that will take days to erase, months to lose in the fibers of his carpet.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she says softly. “Got me off the hook.”

“I didn’t.” 

A noise of disbelief, settling in the throat. Constrained.

“He said he knew and respected my father. That happens often.”

Musing on this, she turns and raises her eyes to his. “It must be interesting, to have people grant that to you wherever you go.”

She’s quite short without her shoes. Wilting and exhausted, withdrawing in a way that could leave her as mere wisps as clouds on a cold night.. Even in this tension and the aftermath of another surreal chapter in a chaotic narrative, the urge to sweep glitter off her cheeks and lift her, carrying her off to another planet, is strong and vivid. 

“I assumed you would be picking me up from a station one day,” he says. Hates himself for the heat in his face that seems to crop up only in conversation with her.

With a wry smile, she responds, “So we’re both very lucky little delinquents.”

But her face falls, humor dissipating. When she falls against him, only then do her fears take shape between them. “This is why I leave.” Arms around him and fingers in the fabric of his shirt to stay upright. “Because strange things always happen and it always feels like I can’t stop any of it. Like fate.”

Taking on her weight, his fingers find strands of her hair dancing aloft from the wind; they slip through like silk. When he speaks, it’s a quiet murmur. “Sounds like that girl needed your help.”

“Both of them made it sound much more noble than it was.”

Untangling from him, she passes the back of her hand over her eyes, green and glimmering even in the wan, washed out glow of streetlights. Continues, letting weight off her bruised ankle. “The truth is, I was dancing and tipsy and full of false bravado, and spoiling for a fight. He just happened to trip into my orbit, stupidly bothering someone in front of me. The perfect storm of circumstances.”

Following the movements of her lips, an ache radiating in his chest; how can she tell him not to fall in love with her? 

“Isn’t that everything?”

His words seem to take the wind out of her sails. Breath stolen, strength gone. She concedes his point with a small smile and nothing more.

Wincing as she readjusts her weight, he’s about to tell her he’ll find a car when she steps forward to the curb, albeit wobbly, and firmly thrusts an arm out, reaching into the blank night. Leaving him always wondering on her earthly origins as she summons one from the dead street with the enchantment of nothing other than her will.

They fall in against the seats, drunk on nothing but novelty. 

As she pulls him close by his lapels and dips her tongue into his mouth 

— skin humming and warm, as if she’s still moving and undulating underneath hot lounge lights; music in her bones, the echoes of beats hours before; a tang of tartness and botanics, the tastes on her lips that she shares with his; the sharp inhale that tumbles out when she pulls away and nips his bottom lip —

he’s apt to wonder which cabs they haven’t kissed in yet.

  
  


Damp locks fanned beneath her head, pink waves splayed wide as if dropped from above with the luck to land and lie tenderly in a field, cradled by earth. But it’s just her on the couch, chin crushed to her chest and face partially obscured, half of it pressed into the cushion as if burrowing for sleep.

“So I know I’ve asked you for enough already.”

It’s a tentative beginning, leaving a question unasked. Sasuke moves his thumb in light and repetitive movements against her ankle, skimming the fabric of the wrapping. She opens one jade eye, brilliant even in the twilight. He makes some noise of assent, and she continues.

“I have this work event,” she says. “It’s stupid, really, but I think it’s somewhat of a formal thing. I tried to get out of it, I did, but one evening the owner of the company — the _actual_ company, not the manager of our subsidiary media branch or whatever — was around listening to my show and he spoke to me afterward.” She frowns, the expression of a sour conversation in her mind. “Anyway, he strongly implied it was an event that you wear something nice, and bring someone with. All above my usual social standing.

She pauses to blow a strand of hair from her face, then looks askance, eyes concentrating hard on the cushion. 

“I need someone who’s good at these things. Navigating events like this, all those important people with wealth and to know what they’re actually saying, not just what comes out of their mouths.”

Her meaning is plain: _Who better than you?_

Not speaking just yet, he instead places a hand on her thigh; hours later her skin still hums, pliant and warm and dashed with glitter missed from her wash. 

She shifts beneath his touch, nudging his fingers in an unconscious request. Staring at him fully with open eyes which survey each atom of his face in incisive and keen patterns, memorizing. The sensation, again, of the precipice and the twinge in his stomach and swift wind in his ears, obscuring hearing, drowning out any rational thought. Testing the notion, his hand skims the hem of her skirt; the tug of her lips which stifles a sharp inhale isn’t enough to go on, but the way her eyes brighten as he maneuvers her body easily, considerately, and he’s feeling like the desired target at the barrel end of a poised rifle —

she, eager and him, obsessed.

She trembles like aftershocks — hips caged in by his arms and his handsome chin so close and the fleeting thought of yanking him by his beautiful dark hair _and making a mess of that gorgeous face_ is only to be postponed for another thirty seconds, maybe.

“So,” she exhales, “Will you be my date?”

He responds simply, “Yes.”

An amused smile on her face, eyes alight. “Sometimes, you’re a man of few words.”

Shifting again, her hips sinking into a softer dip in the cushion with a little satisfied sigh. Prompting him to continue the charged venture between her thighs, where his fingers from before are replaced by his lips and the catch of air in her throat is enough to rouse him. Vulnerable things, _stupid things_ , rise to his lips and he swallows them whole, and she senses them; he’s defenseless enough to cough them into her waiting, shaking hands. Instead he whispers against the hot skin of her thigh:

“Do you trust me?”

Sakura reflects it’s a trite question to ask, much less to answer, with him between her legs. Fingers plucking at the edge of her skirt, she says, “Yes.”

And the rest is a whisper lost in her gasp, because despite her caution she’s a failure at any rational thought like this, so dizzy and losing the concept of what’s real and what’s bliss, and it’s possible it was never voiced at all. 

_But only just._

  
  


Bringing him to life with her soft hands on each side of his face and the fruity scent of her shampoo, she whispers, “I’m starving.” 

On the floor, both sprawled out on his luxuriant living room rug, verdant like lush jungle and comfortable enough to serve as the night’s chaise. Neither’s slept for much time, the sun’s aurora crowning the horizon with a prophetic red crescent. Again, waking up next to her has the unmooring sensation of devastation and they’re scattered as debris. 

They pull the previous night together in languid movements: Refolding blankets, resetting pillows. Quick face rinses. She limps around on her own despite his quiet protests, intent on breakfast — food this time. 

“I’m okay,” she laughs, running her hands over counters and underneath couch cushions. Likely her phone. 

Sasuke finds it facedown on the floor, and flips it over. Immediately it lights up and reveals messages upon messages, and as another comes in they flash again, regroup as they hit a limit. Blinding in the dark. All of them from the same number, unsaved, tender and worried and beseeching in a way that doesn’t strike him as a lover _and his heart rate falls_ but the way Naruto has messaged him after disappearing without preamble in a seedy bar or out a back alley, intent on a scuffle with someone to make him feel alive. A best friend who’s rescued another one from numerous poor decisions and choices when they’re feeling low like a layer beneath dirt.

The sound of her nails clicking against the case and scraping his skin startles him as it’s snatched from his hands; it’s a rough motion, jarring. Eyes jejune and dismayed. Emotional whiplash from the previous second as she swallows hard and clutches it to her chest and a sense of an animal cornered.

“Don’t,” she hisses.

“Sakura—”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Are you all right?”

Sliding it into her pocket, she pivots away; he takes her forearm and she shakes him off with the same ferocity with which she usually pulls him close. “Fine.”

“Would you be honest if you weren’t?”

Lips twitching, a response he can see her holding in. Instead, she swings her purse onto her shoulder in a wide arc that keeps him at arm’s length and makes an attempt to limp out the door with her chin high. She’s moving too fast on that sprain and he knows that _she knows_ , pre-med and all.

He heads out the front door after her, snatching up his jacket and keys as he goes.

Frustration mounts as she punches the door close button with a loud _smack_ so he has to take the next one. Head spinning at the shift in it all and the horrible weariness that surfaced in her eyes; and everyone has something like that, the trigger to the shutdown and a signal to bar the doors. Taps his foot impatiently at the elevator ride that seems to last for years.

Lobby, out the doors. She’s crossing the street against the lights, and he calls after her. 

“Sakura!”

“Leave me alone!”

Bewildered, he plunges forward into the crosswalk—

The screech and hiss and smell of overworked brake pads; at the loud thumping sound Sakura pivots with a small scream mingling with cursing and raised voices—

Sasuke waves the driver’s screaming and his near-fatal experience away with the same annoyance of flicking away an insect, and it seems to bring him to an aggressive and lethal sort of calm. Something in his shoulders and jaw that lifts him, comprises control. And now she’s loath to move, feeling rooted to the spot by his glimmering dark eyes and the aberrant brush with catastrophe that intertwines their souls delicate as lace. Thinking _perhaps he can survive even me,_ knowing as he advances that she could fall into his arms and he would break bones and move the world to remain in her space; he would lay it all at her feet.

Raises a hand to him, reaching as he safely makes it onto the sidewalk—

A thin arm causes her to pull up short, a horizontal barrier swung firmly into her path. Stumbling a little, she follows the long blonde hair with her eyes and drinks in the stance of this woman with her back to her.

Something breaks, a ballpoint hammer to a vulnerable crack in her decrepit heart. 

“You better back off!” A voice Sakura knows in every fiber of her being, rattling her bones. Sasuke stops in his tracks at the sight of this blonde woman in his path, and shows his palms in conciliation and confusion.

With a toss of her hair, the woman turns to Sakura and holds her at arm’s length like she’s sprung from the grave, reborn and she’s unable to believe it. Fingering her long hair and her eyes so blue, ocean and skies, beg for recognition. “It’s _me._ It’s Ino!”

Mouth falling open, Ino takes her lack of response as shock and shakes her head in a rapid motion, back and forth. “Shit, Sakura. I’ve been looking — I _found_ you.” Laughs in a light trailing way, stunned. Voice revealing a lightheadedness, a lovely giddiness.

Without warning she tackles her in a violent hug, the vehement and frenzied embrace of someone whose whole of her soul was lost and then found. Fingers clutching at hair and fabric and then Sakura obliges, relents and their behavior’s the same, scrabbling and wavering voices. 

Sasuke watches as Sakura lets her chin rest, heavy and weary, on Ino’s shoulder. The reunification of two who have traveled on significant roads alongside one another, the mortar and brick of what he recognizes as found family. 

Tears cutting salty paths down Sakura’s cheeks as Ino says again,

“I found you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank the lovely All Time Low for "Glitter and Crimson" for the opener
> 
> Raising questions with little answers? Yes I am possibly
> 
> That officer scene was uncomfortable because it's sort of an amalgamation - like, those are partly real experiences, the diminutive-ness, the sketchiness of favor and how much can be left to "officer's discretion." But that's a way bigger conversation than me.


	5. V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If his mother was still alive she wouldn’t know what to say to this behavior, these mistakes he’s making: Writhing beneath the burning touch of a tiny nymph with pink hair, splayed beneath her as if blown apart and pinned up by the limbs, lepidoptera, as she straddles him in a hitched-up navy skirt with the heels of her sandals etching divots into his skin that will soften and fade to beautiful bruises.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a little spicy, a little sad  
> that's your warning

V.

 _Take care upon opening,  
_ _This product may contain pieces materials  
_ _Harmful to health —  
_ _Cannot be cured by your riches or wealth_

❦

And so again, he finds himself on some surreal plane of existence where there’s another unfamiliar pretty girl in his kitchen, hailing from fuck knows where, tossed onto earth in a momentary absurdity — arriving on a magic carpet or hot air balloon. Often a silent observer to conversations weighty with importance, he has the talent of existing in a room and giving the impression he’s somehow hearing everything and nothing in the same moment. 

Introductions dispensed. Coffee and food, he’s learned, always serve as a sufficient social lubricant and functions as the perfect excuse to give them time together to untangle a conversation that sounds like an argument they’ve been having for several years of their lives, the type of historical artifacts that define the best relationships; they’re familiar echoes of the bond of a brother long broken and a best friend that he’s sure has extended much more grace than he’s deserved.

Fingers linger on the handles of mugs, grasp them and set them down, pantomiming and gesturing and weaving stories about people he doesn’t know and passing tokens of lives lived in a separate dimension than his. It’s odd, how the histories of others intertwine and as people share pieces of themselves they fill in the empty questions to create bonds anew, the pasts and presents overlapping, echoing and transforming in layers and rings as carbon dating. The details that follow in the tracks of family lines and secrets. 

If he listens, he’ll be able to glean the things this girl has such a difficult time telling him.

“You know it’s hard for your friends when you do this,” Ino chides, reaching forward to flick a lock of her pink hair. A cherished gesture, the type only people so close will tolerate. “Disappear and resurface hundreds of miles away, always moving, never checking in.”

“You should be used to it by now.” Sakura takes a sip of coffee to hide the slight waver in her voice. It gives Sasuke pause and he glances at her over his shoulder from his sentinel role at the stove. 

The tint of her drink reminds him of a specific shade of paint, a desultory memory of his home — Saint Martin Sand. 

“And every time we come together again, I tell you, stop punishing yourself for no reason. At least this time you’ve made some friends. Cute ones.” Ino watches him watch Sakura and their eyes meet — he breaks it with the slightest blush.

The glitter in her eyes is so knowing, so like Naruto’s, he wonders if he should have taken a long walk instead.

“So let’s just lay this on the table,” Ino continues, setting down her mug with a sharp sound. “You two are a thing, and judging by that ridiculous soap opera outside, you’ve been staying here with him?”

“We’re not _together—_ ”

“Yes, yes, you don’t _date,_ I know.” Ino waves a hand, sweeping away her fruitless protestations. Lifting her chin, she says to Sasuke, “I didn’t mean to join in, it’s just, I finally find her and she’s getting chased by some guy, you can see how I could’ve had the wrong idea.”

“I understand,” Sasuke responds, not turning around. “You two are very close.”

“A man of many words.” Ino refocuses on Sakura, who’s running her fingernail on the lip of the mug, staring into coffee the shade of tropical sand. “As long as he’s kind to you, I suppose I can’t show up and start analyzing it.”

“But you will,” Sakura says, grinning.

“Of course I have a million questions; you’re terrible at keeping in touch. For starters, why is your ankle busted?”

With a bleak groan, Sakura lets her face fall into her hands, fingers sinking into her hair. Ino laughs in a weary way, the love of years so lush and apparent throughout, and their feet tap one another under the table. Both pass the heel of a hand underneath their eyes, a quick swipe, gestures in a mirror.

“Are you going to come sit with us or what?” Ino snarks, fearless in her insistence. A similar frankness that Sakura has in her best moments which take peeled layers to surface. Sasuke wonders just where and when their paths forked, and how those laden with cracks in the soul are lucky enough to find supports like these. Adjusting breakfast to a simmer, he brings his own coffee to take up a seat on an adjacent table side, between them. 

“So — how did you two meet?” she asks, tapping the table with each word. Eyes hungry for details, she sways left and right, waiting for one of them to indulge her.

“Ah—”

“Well—”

“He’s a fan of my radio show,” Sakura finally articulates. “He and Naruto — his friend, own a bar and they called in, and honestly I was so curious so I ended up coming in a few days later. And the rest is history.”

Ino smiles. “So how long is that history, two, three weeks?”

Sasuke busies himself with copious coffee drinking, aware he’ll run out before being able to leave the table.

“That’s so cute, it’s nauseating,” Ino adds, grinning at Sasuke. Amused by his embarrassment and baffled that a guy so handsome is sitting here being twisted into knots by a little gossip and interest. _She must drive him crazy_.

As she watches both of them glance away, askance, eyes on anything but one another, knowing Sakura as well as she does means this dynamic and situation for her is a new foray, an unusual wrinkle and snag in her usual routine of cut and run. 

She likes him too. And this, out of all of it, is the most unusual development for her friend that routinely rips up her roots or rarely stays long enough to grow them; the girl that’s been afraid to breathe the same air for one too many heartbeats in fear of making mistakes, taking what she deserves. 

And the longer Ino sees Sasuke’s handsome face up close — messy dark hair, charcoal, sharp eyes, the patrician slope of his nose — there’s thoughts sifting in that slippery layer of the unconscious, shifting as sand in soft winds. A sense she’s missing a crucial detail in a larger game.

“You definitely had a good first night with this one. I know, I can tell.” Refusing pretense, Ino drops this on the table and sips with a satisfied smile. 

“Pig, please!” Sakura sounds annoyed, but it still marries a soft, scolding tone to what must be a childhood, agreed-upon name.

Scrunching up her face, Ino taps her forehead twice. Children making faces on glass windows or at one another on a playground, a reference to simpler times. They grew up together bonded by dirty knees and whispered secrets. Not unlike the way Sasuke and his brother were so long ago, before they were groomed, primed for their inescapable roles: A reprieve from destiny is not the pardon. 

All three startle at the sound of jangling keys; Sasuke, with his back to the door, turns in his seat and throws a careless arm over the back of the chair. Glancing back to Sakura, they exchange a small ghost of a smile, a hidden and intimate reference to experiences only privy to them.

“‘Kay, Sasuke, I know you told me not to just walk into your apartment, ‘specially now that you’ve had this super cute girl around, but this is definitely, totally—”

When he sees Ino at the end of the table, Sasuke gracing him with the woebegone, tired expression that he always receives when intruding, and Sakura smiling at his arrival, he stops in his tracks over the threshold. 

Naruto’s mouth falls open with impunity. Sakura waves at him.

“ — important,” Naruto finishes, closing the door with his foot behind him. Shoulders sagging, he tosses his keys on the counter and whines. “Unreal, man. You found another one. An impossibly attractive girl and now they’re both in your damn kitchen!” 

Ino points at him, palm facing up, in a lazy gesture. “Who’s this dork?”

“That’s his best friend,” Sakura says, nodding at Sasuke. 

“Seriously? This guy?”

“Naruto,” Sasuke begins, running a hand through his messy hair, “the fuck did I tell you about walking in like this? Just knock. Or as you remind me, we have phones.”

“Well maybe you should start putting up a sign or something, or a sock on the door or some shit, because I can’t keep up with your life.” Without invitation, Naruto helps himself to coffee and continues rambling while lifting the lid to inspect the simmering food. “Or better yet you could let me know when you’re just befriending beautiful women and where exactly you find them, because you have zero interest in the ones at the bar.”

“Listen, uh, what’s your name? Naruto, you said? Sasuke and I haven’t had the pleasure of—” Ino breaks off, hissing _ow!_ under her breath from a well-placed kick. “It’s not like that. I’m Sakura’s friend — I’m like the _you_ to _him_ ,” she says, pointing to each of them respectively to illustrate her point. “So relax, because I’m assuming you’re joining us.”

Sakura starts laughing while Naruto drops the lid back onto the pan and stares, mouth in a perfect, round “O.”

Smiling wide, Ino preens in the manner of an exotic species so very cognizant of its worth.

“So, go back to the part where I’m impossibly attractive.”

Sasuke’s second breakfast consisting of people other than Naruto and himself sails by in the way time well-spent feels warm and sublime. The buoyancy of laughter and a tentative kindling, the way it proceeds through a fated narrative as each piece settles into its destined groove. Naruto, unstoppable from the glow of caffeine, breakfast he didn’t make, and an attractive blonde, narrates the dramatic and fated meeting of his best friend and this radio girl of the night in sordid detail, to Ino’s delight. Sakura interjects to correct notions along the way, and Sasuke abandons fantasies of pitching him off the balcony or dropping him down the fire escape, instead settling for heavy sighs and staring at her while she speaks, as she augments the conversation with slender hands and pointed fingers. 

“So then last night he rushed off to save her from the police station. I mean, I was worried too obviously. And . . . I don’t know what all happened after that. You never called.”

Both of them with widened eyes, a clear giveaway as any of all the details that sound ludicrous in the light of day. This time, it’s Sasuke who speaks.

“All I did was pick her up. She was helping someone out and the police needed to speak with her to confirm things.” Taking a quiet sip of coffee, he adds, “She didn’t need saving.”

Sakura’s eyes soften, and she drops her eyes to the remnants of her breakfast. 

Ino sighs, setting her fork on her empty plate with a _clink_. “Knowing her, she beat ‘em up herself.”

“Come _on_ , Ino, why don’t you just tell him all of my embarrassing stories?” Sakura pouts, a joke laced with the tiniest warning, a rough string tightening. “More importantly, I need your help with something.”

“Name it,” Ino says. “I have all the time in the world! I’m staying at a hotel, trying to get a real feel for the city. Never been here, you know, and I’d like to stay a while before—” She breaks off, glancing at Sasuke, and changes tack. “I haven’t seen you in a long time, that’s all.”

“Work is having an event, and I think it’s fancy, very high-class, you know. Those things make me so uncomfortable.”

“I always tell you, everyone’s faking it at those events. You’re sweet enough to muddle your way through one night.” Ino looks Sasuke directly in the eyes; he has the distinct feeling she’s untangling him, and this, and that she has the tenacity to see it through.

“These are rich people, Ino. I’m a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, and I don’t belong there.” 

The comment piques Naruto’s interest momentarily and he tilts his head; Sasuke watches her closely.

“Don’t start that,” Ino warns, again waving away her concerns easily. 

“Apparently it’s not the radio subsidiary itself, but the parent company. The night I was working I think the man I spoke with was the owner, the CEO."

Eyes alight, Ino reaches for her bag slung over the back of the chair and pulls out a thin, light laptop. Pushing aside her empty dishes, she boots it up in half a second and waits for details, eager fingers poised over the keys. “Tell me details.”

“Tall, pale eyes. A stoic sort of guy. Brunette, very long hair. Like yours,” Sakura says to her, “and just as cared for.”

“So very pretty, your usual type, heh,” Ino teases. Her fingers fly over the keys. “I might have an idea . . .”

“Ino has a well-known family,” Sakura explains to Sasuke. Touches his arm in a soft gesture to hold his attention, not that he’s ever able to be distracted away from her. “The Yamanakas?” 

Waving blithely, Ino rejects the notion. “We aren’t that regal, please. We’re in a totally different universe than, say, the Uzumaki’s.”

A full ten seconds passes before what she says registers on Naruto’s face. The typing continues at a lively pace. Sakura’s looking at him with a strange expression, an impassiveness that seems to be a projection, a mask, hiding twisting questions beneath. Naruto looks at Sasuke and opens his mouth — 

— and all that comes is an _ow!_ and tears forming at the corners of his eyes.

“Here we go,” Ino says, pulling back the attention of the group. Turning the laptop around for them to see, she points. “Neji Hyuuga, one of the youngest media moguls and owner of blah blah enterprises, took over when his dad passed away, the usual way it goes in families like these.”

The pale eyes remind her of the girl from the police station, and she looks to Sasuke as if for confirmation. Confirms it to her with an imperceptible nod.

“I assume there’s a press release,” Sakura says, intrigued. 

“Of course. They probably control whoever writes about them anyway. Talk about a conflict of interest.” A relentless cadence of tapping keys, and her ocean eyes are just visible over the lid of the laptop. “‘Annual event, mighty and generous’, blah blah, ‘held at the historic but well-loved — wow, look at this place. It’s beautiful in that old money sort of way. 

Chair legs scrape against the floor as they gather in a semicircle to read along, emitting whistles and comments here and there as they take in the grandiose venue and the Hyuuga family’s credentials. Sasuke, though, is quiet. Sakura’s eyes are wide, dazzled and intimidated by the prospect of all of it.

“Oh god, I can’t go to something like this,” she groans. “I’m going to look so stupid and out of place.” 

“Sakura!” Ino pushes her chair back, startling the other two as they back out of her way. Taking her shoulders, she shakes her a little. “You _have_ to go to an event like this. People bend over backwards maintaining relationships with this family and donate money just to potentially go to this! I know why you need me — to dress you, of course! This is supposed to happen; I know it.”

Sasuke takes Ino’s empty seat, eyes darting over the screen.

“Ino, you’re such a romantic. What am I even going to talk about with these people?”

“It doesn’t matter. These are basically playgrounds for the rich and famous. If you want to give your career a leg up, you have to do this.”

“My career?” Sakura snorts, shoulders sagging. Closing in on herself, an instinctual fear. “Ino, I failed out of pre-med and change leases as often as clothes. Now I do a radio show in the dead of night speaking with lonely people.”

“All the more reason to get out there and find people who can help you. Maybe it’s time to stop leaving with the wind and start trusting yourself. Besides,” she says, hands on her hips, daring her to disagree, “isn’t it time you let yourself have some fun?”

Sakura doesn’t answer, lips slightly parted and seeking a rebuke she doesn’t have. Whirling around, Ino demands of her new friends, “Back me up here!”

“Ah well, Sakura,” Naruto says, sheepish and red, “I’m with Ino, here on this one. And this is totally my own opinion because you’re really cool, and we’re friends now, I think. All these families know each other. It’s a ‘who’s who’ of important people in a lot of industries. And,” here he grins, eyes bright, “you can do and find whatever you want at an event like this.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sakura asks.

“It means,” Ino says, cutting across his response, “that you will not be taking a walk of shame in a princess dress on a dingy train or in the back of a cab. You can stay in my hotel room downtown — it’s not far from the venue. You will arrive and leave from this event in style. If you come home, of course.” She winks with gusto. 

“I’m borrowing this,” Sasuke says abruptly, picking up the laptop and taking his phone out of his pocket with his other hand. Ino shrugs, _go for it_. Taking up a seat in his own living room, he connects with someone on the phone and speaks to them in a tone relatively terse, his rich voice commanding as opposed to conciliatory. 

The sound of his voice tips a smile onto Sakura’s face. Ino glances between the two and the understanding is a jolt of electricity, a hundred tiny neurons firing to complete the picture in the spark of a moment. 

“You asked him already.”

“I’ve vetted him,” Sakura teases, and now it’s impossible to hide. The way the thought of him snatches the air out of her throat, the heavy swallow to recoup; green eyes consuming and caught in a mimeo of the past and Ino knows that it’s not him who has her, but _he_ who has stumbled and tripped into her orbit. And Ino’s only ever seen her look at one other man this way; the nascent and feverish meeting of chance, the genesis of an endless chain reaction, atoms in a runaway chemical tryst. Ino had been present for it but somehow failed to notice everything that was wrong. All of it colliding in this moment as she sees the shadow of its consequence in her gaze.

“Thank you,” Sasuke says. With the slightest incline of his head, he returns the closed laptop to Ino and pockets his phone. Unable to tear her gaze away now, Ino struggles to form words as his fingers take Sakura’s elbow and he murmurs to her in an undertone. A talent of omitting others from his space if he chooses, even as they scrabble on the outside, a manipulation, or closer to a bewitchment, of reality. 

Sakura looks down at her wrapped ankle, giving it a flex and wiggle. Ino knows he’s already doomed by the damned, and all she can do is give her futile warning and watch it play. Sasuke speaks again, but the chaotic buzzing in her ears drowns it all out.

Sakura folds her arms, resolute. “That’s so expensive, Sasuke. I’ve . . . never been anywhere that nice.”

And he tucks pink strands behind her ear in the crackling and kindling of the atmosphere difficult to breathe in. 

“And a suite? What could we possibly do with all that space?” 

But there’s a smile seeping into the corner of her lips, and his suggestive silence leaves myriad answers.

“You have a balcony.” Ino raises her voice, pulling them back to reality. “Show me it?”

Sasuke shrugs in genuine indifference; Sakura narrows her eyes. “You just want to interrogate him. Please don’t scare him away — I’ll do it soon enough.”

Ino brushes past them and throws aside the sliding glass door, styled French, reflecting that this isn’t the type of man many likely manage to forcibly do much of anything. It may be curiosity or out of deference to the woman he’s entangled with, but he follows without complaint.

The door is barely closed before she bursts. 

“Do you even know her, Sasuke?”

Furrows his eyebrows as if she’s a mildly interesting painting, but doesn’t respond to her immediately. Dark eyes glimmer with a suspicion that makes her shiver a little as they're turned on her, unflinching, a shadow in them she wasn’t expecting — likely the very thing that’s brought Sakura to it, a frenzied moth to light. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, the alluring visions in her eyes drowning him in an ocean similar to the stories, the schizophrenic and duplicitous nature of open family secrets. 

“Do you even know who I am?”

“Please,” she snorts, surveying him. “Messy dark hair, that attitude of yours. Handsome nose. Those eyes.” At this, her gaze flits away to the horizon. “You’re an Uchiha.”

Though he doesn’t confirm, the way his gaze stays steady, level, and intense is enough.

“Granted,” she continues, “there are a lot of you, and you all have quite the strong genes, looking so much alike. You’re one of the most famous families in the country. And I think she has an idea, but it’s different when you don’t grow up hearing the stories; when you’re not in the same circles. She’s not like you.”

“If you have something to ask,” he says, “I’d rather we not dance around it.” The bite, the press of assertion.

Ino knows it’s everything Sakura has a taste for, a history of — a craving that’s always worth tearing apart at the tendons and roots.

“If I thought you’d be straightforward about it, I’d ask. I think you have no idea of the type of person you’re obsessed with.”

“I’m not—”

“Don’t bother with denying it. You think I haven’t seen this before? Look . . . we do this all the time, run in circles. After she left town, and her parents died, I tried to keep up with her. She’s my best friend. She’s not ever out to ruin anyone but that’s what she usually does. Guys, just, they get wrapped up in her and then when it’s too serious for her, she leaves. She thinks she’s hard to love, like she’s cursed or blessed or _something_ that ends up more like a sickness than something functional.” 

The accuracy and plain verity of her words feels like a sharp jab to the chest. 

“And I don’t know much about you as a person, but I do know what I’ve read and what I’ve heard.” 

“You’re right,” Sasuke says. “You _don’t_ know anything about me. And I don’t give time to gossip and rumors.” 

“You don’t get it. She didn’t even have my number in her new phone, and she never keeps any. You know why? She expects people in her life to disappear, so she just leaves them first.”

Sasuke remembers the call to the bar, the number that would have been fresh in her mind or the one on file with the city, as opposed to his personal phone. 

“She can’t stay away from certain types of people. Certain men. Everyone has a weakness, right? And that’s hers. The more I’m talking to you, seeing you around each other, I have the feeling your problem is the same.”

He’s certainly not in the mood for another woman too sharp for her own good. Avoiding her assessment, he deflects. “How did you even find her, then?” 

“Trade secrets,” she says in a sardonic tone. “My father’s a, what do you call it, ‘analyst’ for the government.” She adds air quotes to make her point clear. “Sure that’s what he does. I can tell by the types of friends we had, all families who understood the culture. You only have gatherings like we did when your family’s, A, in the government or B, organized crime.” Tilting her head, she smirks. “You’d know.”

“So, family resources?”

“But really,” she laughs, “I just used the internet. It’s not so hard to do if you know enough about someone. We are best friends, after all.”

Like Sakura, it can be difficult to tell how close she is to sarcasm. A similar brand of mordancy. He takes Ino at her word with a nod.

“She’s smart. She probably has an idea of who you might be, maybe she’s trying _not_ to know. And she’s never been one for gossip or celebrity news — she reads a lot, but always nerdy subjects. Well, that’s why she was going to be a doctor, I suppose.” 

A silence. When he deigns to speak, Ino isn’t able to hide her surprise. 

“She’s told me a bit about herself, but not much. I don’t think her and I are people who open up easily.”

“She used to be different,” Ino says wistfully. “But there are things in this life that are difficult to shake off; they hurt you so deeply you don’t heal. Or at least, you don’t heal correctly.”

“I’m guessing you won’t tell me what those things were?”

When she raises her sapphire eyes to his, she’s torn between spilling it all and knowing that a betrayal so significant would ruin a relationship with the only person she can still trust. Still, she’s terrified thinking about the prospects of either outcome with this man, knowing that he is madly, stupidly in love with a harbinger of chaos, and most don’t make it out of that web in one piece. Perhaps no one does, with her.

“That’s not my place,” she finally says. “Go with her and have fun. You strike me as someone who could use some, too. But I mean this in the kindest possible way — one day she’ll run, and she will leave. She can’t help herself. She . . . can’t stay away from the mess.”

Sasuke continues watching her in mild amusement. His smirk causes a nervous flutter in her stomach; Ino puzzles over his underreaction to her words. 

Opening the door and gesturing her back inside, signaling the end of their conversation, he simply says, “I know.” 

They rejoin the other two: Sakura with her ankle propped up on a cushion and Naruto next to her babbling about what sounds like his childhood, tales of adventures and boring classes in private institutions, uniforms and study prep and a flush of love for parents long gone. Sasuke suspects now that the place and life she comes from is a world he’s not familiar with; when she nods and makes careful comments here and there, trying to carefully step around the gaps in her knowledge, that emotion swells again. That urge to drape her in finery and act as the constant indulgence she can use over and over, to absolutely and unequivocally hand her the keys to a kingdom. A compulsion to fulfill a need unspoken. 

“Hey you, Naruto.” His babbling screeches to a halt, and he automatically catches the phone Ino tosses to him with a smile. “Let me get your number.”

The way his expression flips in an instant, confusion to an incandescent brightness, causes another fluttering. “Sure!” 

Ino exchanges with each of them, and she notices as she wanders around their contacts in her surreptitious way that neither of them have Sakura’s last name in their phone. Filing that detail away for herself, her thumb hovers over the screen as she finishes her entry in Naruto’s phone and returns it.

When she looks at his contact card and sees the name _Uzumaki_ , she taps to edit and adds a sunshine, grinning.

“By the way, if you’re planning to stay for a long time and don’t want to be in a hotel for all of that, I mean, I live across the hall. Just saying. That way you’re close to Sakura and people you know in a new city!”

Hand on her hip, Ino tries to keep her ego tamped down, if even just a little. “You’re so transparent.”

Horrified, he holds up his hands with palms out, shaking his head. “No, no, I have a guest bedroom, no one stays in it, really. I’m not trying anything funny.” Indicating Sakura, he laughs. “She’s punched two people in a month, and I’m one of them. If you’re her friend, I know what I’m up against.”

.

.

.

Growing up Sasuke was in his fair share of fights and scraps on the playground, and then older, in bars and with drunk friends — after his mother dies he will participate in and be the progenitor of so many more. Her scolding reverberates in his ear about all the reasons he shouldn’t mar his handsome, regal face, and he hears his father in these same memories dismissing her concerns, sneering that it’s good he toughens up in any way he can.

If his mother was still alive she wouldn’t know what to say to this behavior, these mistakes he’s making: Writhing beneath the burning touch of a tiny nymph with pink hair, splayed beneath her as if blown apart and pinned up by the limbs, lepidoptera, as she straddles him in a hitched-up navy skirt with the heels of her sandals etching divots into his skin that will soften and fade to beautiful bruises.

Two fingers in his mouth and her other hand working in a heated, rhythmic pace on his cock, he’s sure there would be a distinct lack of approval of being roughhoused by this girl with no name who seems to have the desire to leave him a shaking, gasping excuse for _his_ family name.

He’s sure he would agree to let her kill him if she wanted; there’s almost nothing at this point that’s beyond the realm of reasonable requests. Especially with her pinning him without mercy, soaked and dripping between her thighs, a red and mottled flush surfacing through the skin of her chest and collarbones as she presses him into small submissions, the ways that men with faces like his don’t often experience. 

(Returning from shopping with a large bag swinging from her hand, eyes bright despite her little limp. Volunteering information before he’s even apt to ask: She loves it, and no he can’t see it yet, and she has work in a while but not quite yet. Ino’s out exploring the city accompanied by Naruto.) 

And it’s what she doesn’t say but he hears in her voice, in the come-hithers and low tones and the space between them always feeling like an ache, an endless expanse that yearns for nothing but to be restitched and torn over again in repetitious revolutions, the drowning and resuscitation an addiction in itself. Coming together to pull apart and wound with another million fibers each time in a dazed and deadly isochronism. 

Small and light like feathers and lips like morphine: With her legs around his hips and fingers in his dark hair yanking him to expose the apple of his neck, she hisses

_I want to hear you_

Down the hallway and he does as she bids, gritting his teeth while her lips tour his neck and linger in his ears

_I want your noise_

And he tries to take her with him but she places her fingers on his chest and bounces him into the soft bedspread, straddling him, clawing at his shirt and maneuvering it over his head to toss it aside. Bites her lip as she raises her chin to gaze down on him, jade eyes and parted lips and rolling her hips in an agonizing move that tears a moan from his throat — 

_Good boy_ she says, _good boy_

And when she says it his pulse beats in a stilted cadence and his hips press up against her, desperate, unable to touch enough of her like this and how did he fucking end up here, with her still clothed and him barely so while coaxing the full beautiful, colorful continuum of human sounds from his throat, sounds he’s stymied to know or possess and why when she calls him this his breath hitches, a choke, a reaction he’s unable to hide, not the least when her slim fingers reach for him, the scrape of her nails on his belt 

Hips jerking and shuddering again as she takes him into her hand 

_It’s unfair how attractive you are, Sasuke_

Like before he reaches for her, the calluses of his fingers dragging across her canvas of skin on fire and 

she slaps them away, clicking her tongue in admonishment, he doesn’t learn

_I meant what I said; that’s no way to get me to help you_

Swallows down the pathetic word that sits as a lump in his throat, the one she’s aiming for and he doesn’t know how she knows it’s there but she’ll tear it from him no matter how many minutes a breakdown takes, and great fucking god he’s about to give it to her under duress of those soft silk fingers, the same ones that hold coffee mugs and command his attention and tell stories but now they feel like they’re where they belong, pumping him with the practiced and smooth movements of one who wields control so precise

_Fuck, Sa-Sakura, fuck_

_Oh sweetheart, that’s not what quite I’m looking for_

The first time a finger finds its way past his lips and into his mouth, open and panting and wanting already, the jolt and shudder and full roiling of his lean, fit body forces a breathy gasp from her own; the dangerous rock of her own hips she indulges in leaves her eyelashes fluttering shut in glimmering repose. 

The tang, it bursts on his tongue 

Unable to process the taste — salt, sweat, musk, the liminal zest between his and hers impossible to sift between 

Then another long, slim finger in his mouth and here she persists again, ruthless and divine in and inhuman and the unceasing rhythm as she works him stays just a single syncopated note from release, as if she knows the precise rhythm and flow in which they could collide 

_Please_

_I want to hear you, Sasuke_

Incoherent, torn him from him as skin from fruit, the feathering of plumage 

_Please — !_

That laugh, spreading and coating as viscid honey, dense and lush and soaking him down 

_You’re so good, you know. I know men like you hate this_

— the buckles of her heeled sandals patterning friction on the skin of thighs and the repetitive sticky scrapes of well-worn athletic tape as she holds him, cages him—

 _but you just look so good like this, I_ **_love_ ** _you like this_

So precious, she reflects for a moment, taking him in, wasted and dashed and black pupils blown as his eyes lose focus for a moment. Removes her fingers from his mouth with a wet hollowing sound that brings with it a guttural groan, throaty and incoherent 

And the absolutely desperate pitch at the close 

undoes her and she yanks him up by the hair, scrabbling at the bare skin of his shoulders with her fingernails and kisses him, when he lifts her so easily and they fumble with flimsy and frustrating fabrics until she settles on him again with a moan, filled to the brim and lost in brilliance

stuttering out his name in his ear in ways that make her forget she doesn’t plan for forevers. 

“Dude.”

Naruto snaps his fingers in front of Sasuke’s twice, thrice. A flicker of recognition and reality surfaces and he blinks, swatting away his friend’s hand.

“Don’t.”

“Oh I’m sorry, you’ve just been spaced the fuck out for ten minutes.”

“I doubt that,” Sasuke says tartly, plucking a piece of paper from the office desk and pretending to consider it. Careful ignorance seems preferable to enduring the endless taunting and ribbing from Naruto, and lately that’s been nothing less than a guarantee. 

“Okay, a minute or so, but you look blown out. Wasted. I can’t put my finger on it. Do you feel sick?”

“Shut up, will you? I’m—” 

“Sad?”

“Working,” he finishes firmly. 

“Nah, yer not.”

Naruto folds his arms and squints at Sasuke, then takes a meandering lap around the back office, hemming and hawing. 

Though he’s not concentrating on any numbers in front of him, he loses focus again, flatlines, lost in a dream. Contented. 

Naruto punches his fist into his hand opposite, shaking his head with a laugh. “I’m an idiot.”

“Now you’ve got it.”

“She laid you out, didn’t she? Sent you on a _ride_. What obscenely tight part of you did she get into?”

Sasuke leans back in the office chair, folding his arms. Avoiding his eyes and the flickering heat in his face that threatens to give him away, like he’s a little boy. “Fuck off.”

“I’m definitely going to ask her what she did to you. You’re like, bright. Glowing? I’ve heard that word. It’s coming off you in, like, waves.”

“If you ever say that word around me again,” Sasuke says, snatching up a stapler, “They won’t find your body.”

Raising it, Sasuke pretends to throw it — Naruto flinches. Relaxes.

Sasuke whips it at him anyway. 

“Ow! Temper, tsk tsk,” Naruto teases, rubbing his arm where it hit. 

Shikamaru strolls in with his hand in his pockets, sighing. “Ah, Sasuke, there’s someone asking about you at the bar. He’s been hanging around for a while and I don’t think he’s leaving. I figured if he knew you, he’d contact you directly, but—”

“Hey, hey Shikamaru,” Naruto interrupts. “Look at him. He’s too busy being lost in—”

“Who is he?” Sasuke asks. “What does he look like?”

“Eh, honestly, he looks a lot like you. Older, maybe? Same eyes, spiky hair.”

A lurching, a twisting in the gut. The expression on his face foreboding enough that both of them move swiftly out of his path as he heads for the front, adrenaline pouring into his limbs, readying for a brawl.

When he arrives, however, nothing’s left but the wrinkled napkin, weathered and worn from dallying fingers and the perspiring empty glass, drunk to its dregs.

For a moment Sasuke gazes across the bar — a slower night with lingering groups in booths and a few scattered and two-top tables. No one remains that looks like him, not even close. 

After all, he can always feel them in a crowd. As if bonded by invisible strings, always forced into the productions and whims of the family, it being a force so much darker and greater than himself. The portraits in the old house halls with a multitude of photographs in varying time periods and shades, an illustration of consolidated privilege and sovereignty. Far from the old ways things used to be done but nevertheless woven into the fabric of societal institutions in a manner so deft and desecrating.

The things his brother had always hated, railing against it in quiet dissent.

And in the end he had made his point, violent and vehement in a final way.

It rises, a pain in his chest and an unbidden, murky memory of the way his father slammed his hands on the table, again and again in an unceasing rhythm and his finger so close to his brother’s face he was sure it wouldn’t make it through the argument. As the years aged them all, he had begun to reject the authoritarian notion and the name. Perhaps it had broken him more than Sasuke had been able to understand.

When he remembers it again and he’s unable to breathe, he hates how he grasps the counter and gropes for the nearest bottle, and he would lunge for paint thinner if it made it all stop — the echoes of potent rage rising to a crushing din

_You don’t bring people like that around — !_

_Never again — !_

_You_

_don’t bring_

_her here — !_

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The opening is from "Brace Yourself" by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. The lyrics for this song all felt incredibly fitting and I am outing some of my music preferences so very clearly 
> 
> also 3 cheers for making it through work layoffs


	6. VI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “‘Chaste and temperate people — not of their own will — fall in love, badly.’ You probably know that one, as well-read as you are.”
> 
> The copy of her book, given as a gift, sits on the bedside table in a room across the city in the apartment of the boy in love that handed it to her — the man that touches her like fire. She senses a string visible only in the light, bonding her to him, a tripwire strung by fate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ya'll saints for reading

VI.

 _Nothing sinister starts out sober,  
_ _Sometimes the chemicals work me over  
_ _The things you learn at 4 a.m. —  
_ _When do I become who I am?_

❦

An impeccable internal clock wrests her from sleep — the day promises to be long and lonely.

She takes a moment or three to sink and snuggle deeply into the plush mattress, pressing warm sheets to her nose and inhaling; the heady scents of affection, musk, and skin. Lately, when she steals out of his bed in the early hours, untangling from his lean muscled limbs, a sliver pricks her heart with the split and sting of a papercut. Unfamiliar. It’s not like her to do this. 

The facsimile of a time before, now with something she’s afraid to admit might be — 

_You can’t love him, though. You don’t know him, and he doesn’t know you._

Everything’s cold as she sits on the edge of the bed, willing herself to depart as she has so many times before.

She startles, head whips ‘round; the pads of his fingers trail down her spine in a way that always makes her feel seen. As if he’s reading sordid and fanciful tales found only in the vertebrae, an archaic divergence of Braille, groping around in the hurricane for the doctrine that defines her.

A blind man trying to see.

“You make it so difficult to start the day,” she says. Laughs a little. “It’s always hard to leave you.”

Purses her lips after this admission, feeling stupid for letting it out. Turning back to him, everything aches, the pains borne not of muscles and bones but something in the sinew and the soul. His sleepy groan. The way his handsome head settles into his hand, propped up by the elbow. Messy dark hair, eyes sharp in the soft dawn light. Well-built planes of chest pried apart by her nails in theory though less in skin, as she continues to search for the gems that were fashioned and pressed to create him.

She’s used to so easily taking one’s essence and getting the measure, weighing it in her hands. Then she flees, leaving them undone and keeping herself intact. And though he reveals so many things in his gentleness that she’s realizing are unusual for him, there’s plenty left to be devoured. 

Still, she can’t tell him what she really sees: The shadows and edges of someone familiar, who told her too much. What man wants to hear they remind a woman of another? She would sound crazy if she tried to explain, even if the sensation of knowing, the creeping of a fated collision, claws at her throat. 

She thinks of Ino’s knowing looks, pleading her to dig deeper. To confront and process the truth. 

In a voice razed with sleep, throaty from the music she forced from him before, its richness drips like drowning. “There’s no reason you have to leave, Sakura.”

Blushing. She’s fucking _blushing._ It makes her turn away quickly from the bed as if it, and her, are on fire.

“Things to do, people to see. You understand the mundane demands on your days, I’m sure.”

“Hmm, used to. That’s not the case anymore.”

“Well,” she says, plucking clothes from her growing pile in the corner of his room, “I at least need to check on the apartment I still pay for. Make sure it hasn’t burned down. Then errands, a bit of this, a bit of that.”

He grunts at her cheery ambiguity, but doesn’t press. Fully dressed, she turns around and smiles in an attempt to stretch joy over the bones of her face. It’s futile but passable, and still it’s not his place to ask. 

“Are you returning this time?”

His question forces a moment’s pause. Snatching up the shopping bag containing her new dress, she turns to march out of his room with all the dignity she can muster — 

until she touches her fingers to her lips and sends a kiss his way before ducking out.

As every morning, he folds his arms behind his head, letting the warmth of her ebb and dissipate from the sheets, his room, his heart. He swallows, grimacing at the sensitive scraping sensation in his throat, the aftermath of overuse and his vulnerable stupidity. The worst part, of course, is the merciless mocking he’s been receiving from his well-meaning friend. And also his situation from the other night, which Naruto so kindly refers to as _freaking out._

Lying in thought as the sun climbs in its daily arc. Then, he sits up and runs hands through his hair, craving a shower and coffee and her skin. Pulling himself out of bed, he finds himself in front of the pile of her clothes that’s taken on a life of its own, fabric in mayhem. Taking a shirt off the top of it, he shakes it out and checks its scent, then crosses to his closet and after contemplation, moves some of his own clothes to one end of it to create a new space.

As always, everything echoes in an apt metaphor.

Swipes her transit pass and breezes through the turnstile without a hiccup. It’s appreciated when the train arrives timely and with room, and she settles into a seat against the window for the first leg of her city journey. 

She’s lived in a variety of places, and grew up in a town with too few people who all knew too much. Going to her apartment means a trip with two transfers, and she muses on the different ways people knit their lives into being, how what’s good for one may not be for another. As the subway stations transition to elevated stops running flush and parallel with the downtown streets, her mind wanders to the upcoming event and the revelations Ino’s arrival has sifted from her unconscious. 

Lost in thought as she leaves the train car, taking a set of stairs so familiar that the rhythm of her feet on them always echoes the same. To the next line, heading west. 

It seems that one’s world can be small even as large and sweeping as populations themselves are. From her long-standing friendship she’s gleaned and the knowledge absorbed to survive, still there are unspoken stories and understandings so lost on her. 

_(I’m certain he’s an Uchiha._

_Right, I think he said that to me the night we met. I don’t see what’s relevant about it, Ino. It’s probably a common name._

_It is, but only because there are so many of them. The family is like a web — they have hands in everything.)_

Sakura’s deduced some hierarchy of family names, an inborn knowledge children within them grow up acutely aware of, and in the case of those positioned on the collar, the outer ring, they know always, socially, where they stand. As a girl from a tiny place on the wrong side of the tracks

_as was flung at her, like a slap, from a man brimming with arrogance and a sour gaze_

none of it meant much until she tested into her new school, clawing her way out of a dusty and insular community, emerging into a world with brand new rules. More than that, the lifting of the curtain on society and the people who command its orchestrations. Lucky to be a girl of sharp mind and quick processing because the demands for those who seek greatness are great in themselves. 

But in the end she failed, flew too close to the sun, or perhaps delved too deeply into the dark. 

Still wonders if her failures and tragedies were all her own doing, or the machinations of a hateful man, one who held the world. Would she ever know? 

The disembodied train voice announces her stop, and she blinks herself out of a daze, leaping for the door.

Walking in her neighborhood is a fraught and tense affair; if it remains at the level of catcalls and sneers she considers it of no consequence. Rarely has it escalated, and good thing, as these are known and stained city blocks that officers no matter what they pantomime hesitate to tread.

The familiar man lingers on the corner, always with his eyes on a daily terror Sakura’s not able to see. 

She removes her shoes in the entryway, hoping it's early enough to avoid speaking with her roommates in name only. Not quite friends by her own admission and fault, with her tendency to avoid putting down roots.

Creeping through the kitchen, she jumps and curses as the light flicks on.

“Where have you been?” 

The woman and her shock of red hair seem to swallow everything else in the drab kitchen. With her arms folded and glasses slipping to the edge of her nose, clad in her usual bizarre attire, she has the air of an aggressive and nosy professor combined with the ragged, prickly edge of a moonlighting drummer in a now-defunct band. 

“I told you, Karin,” Sakura sighs, crossing to the fridge and peering inside, “I work at weird times, and sometimes travel. Everything’s paid, right? I told you not to worry about me.”

“I’m not worried,” Karin responds, affronted. “I’m nosy. Big difference.” 

“With roommates like this, who needs enemies?” With his lopsided, mildly toothy grin, a man with white hair strolls in, with another one of intimidating height and soft footfalls coming in closely behind. “As long as the lights are on, I don’t give a shit where she goes.”

Sakura winces as Karin’s hand connects with his face, the sharp crackle of air and skin on skin bursting in the previously quiet kitchen. 

“Suigetsu, you’re barely civil.” With a gentle smile, the big man inclines his head to Sakura. “Glad you’re staying safe, at least. Wherever you go.”

Juugo always has a way of being kind in a way that gives her a bout of heartburn, paired with eyes that don’t seem to take her excuses and brush-offs at face value. Eyes on the linoleum, she returns the small upturn of the lips and shuts the fridge.

Down the hallway with the backdrop of Karin and Suigetsu’s bickering in her ears. Digging for her keys, she locates the one that unlocks the door to her space. 

Untouched, colorless, always the same. The functional essentials of a bed and a desk, and curtains drawn against its own depression. Tossing her bags on the mattress, she stands in the dark and considers the dank and dusty smell, the stillness. The hairs on her arms prickle with a cold sweat — 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” Juugo says. Pauses, eyes always seeking, digging into her. Extending a sheaf of mail in his large hand, hovering, aloft. “Figured I’d keep these for you in the same place. And away from them.”

A rush of affection for someone who extends her grace as a principle of his compass and never attaches too many questions. In return she’s careful not to accept too much, not keen to take more than she can give, which feels like so little. Accepting the mail, he leaves her to herself without another word. 

Flipping through it, none of it seems important, junky and irrelevant. After all, it’s hard to follow constantly changing addresses of someone who never wants to be found. Tossing it aside as well, she opens her closet and kneels, moving things aside to locate a nondescript shoebox. Leans back on her haunches as if contemplating a fraught choice. With slightly shaking hands, she pulls it to her and removes the lid with the tentative and aversive movements of unwrapping an infected wound. Stares at the items inside, collected in magpie fits in the harried moments she chooses to leave each chapter of her life; vivid and edged memories to cut her fingers and lips on.

She sits

and sits

and when she’s done, she wraps it all up exactly as before, hands moving through her own belongings as a ghost. Ensuring no one can return later to see the afterimages.

She’s still thinking about the papers in the box as she gives a small smile through the window to her companion and settles the headphones around her neck in preparation; her night’s just begun.

As the predetermined music sets play and eventually give way to the improvisatory mixes courtesy of the resident DJ, the questions tumble over one another in an endless unconnected bubble of thought, entwined as snakes. The prospect of an evening around people so unfamiliar and of a certain stature, an invisible web she’s had to suss out in the way of an interloper, is anxiety-inducing at best and nauseating at worst. If her conversation with the man she now knows is Neji Hyuuga is any indication, she’ll be in for an excruciating evening of being on display.

But this is how men such as him navigate the world — others’ discomfort is unimportant, their concerns trivial, inconsequential because all the space belongs to the powerful. The seen.

Twilight creeps. 

Her mind rebukes, of course, the idea that this Uchiha Sasuke could be similar. She knows the markers, however, of trauma and wealth. Indicated in large part because he never discusses it even when making overt gestures, _ah, like the hotel suite._ Head spinning at the implications, which seems silly on its face considering the wanton whatever-it-is they’ve been participating in with enthusiasm. No, it’s the idea of an expensive gesture solely for her comfort, to spend time with her, an extension of something that checks the box of uncomfortable but also fills an indulgent desire. 

And in moments the way he turns his eyes on her, the way he drinks her in to slake an endless thirst, is a faulty and weak imprint of every man before and she’s sure, in the marrow of her bones, every single one that will follow.

The thought of him pricks gooseflesh at the base of her neck, sweeping against each vertebrae in legato lyrical phrases. A sense of impending doom and breathless danger and frenzied affection coalescing as one.

“But if it’s _proven_ to be a biochemical reaction,” the man on the line says, pulling Sakura back to the conversation, “and the brain is being flooded with substances causing someone to not only fall in love, but essentially bewitch them while around this new individual, it’s no different than a powerful addiction to the object of your affection. And if we’re now foraying into using this word, ‘addiction,’ how do we examine the truthfulness of chemicals run amok?”

Sakura shakes her head. “All of those things eventually normalize,” she insists. “Let’s not forget that this is an initial stage of attraction and what begins as passion may not persist as that. There’s an arc to this journey — it’s true in every type of relationship.”

“Ah, you find me cynical. I can tell.”

Smiling to herself, she says, “A bit, maybe, Kabuto.”

“Let’s follow this thread.” 

Where has she heard that before? Often a sounding board and many times a therapist, it isn’t unusual for topics to derail in these ways, exploring scattershot threads to follow, ideas wandering as lost lambs heading for the end of the night slaughter. 

“Sure, if you’d like. Chemistry doesn’t mean we should view it only in a scientific lens. That can be an excuse to view it in an emotionally detached way. The honeymoon period of any bond, whether it’s the beginning of a friendship or someone new and special you’ve met, of course involves strong feelings. And sure, it’s all aided and abetted by the best of chemicals, but that doesn’t undermine any of what it is.”

“Perhaps this is where we disagree: How do we unravel where reality begins and the brain’s illusion ends? Can you or I trust this process? Should we? When the origin of something that should be taken, I imagine, seriously, like love, is rooted in a runaway operation, how do we parse that?”

“It’s a good question. I do agree there,” Sakura interrupts, pointing at nothing in the air, even though Kabuto isn’t able to see her. “It begins like a spark, and fire’s chaotic. But some manage to tame it into something for a lifetime.” 

“I suppose none of us can confirm the lifetime part, admittedly,” Kabuto says. “Your use of the word chaotic is interesting, perhaps quite personal to you?”

“We’re always on borrowed time, Kabuto,” she warns, using his name as punctuation in close.

He chuckles, a unique blend of arrogance and deference. “Young lady,” he says, “changing tack here, do you believe love can exist in this way, from a person in pursuit of non-human entities?”

“If this becomes a discussion of something untoward—”

“I’m thinking of abstract concepts, or at the very least complex ones — not animals, if you were worried.”

“I was, in fact; we’ve been down that road before at 2:00 a.m., and it’s a strange one.”

“I’ll offer myself up as a specimen, then. I grew up as an orphan without many strong bonds, and I feel that few people or their emotions offer a use for me. Over the years the only love that has made any sense for me is twofold: First, a desire to serve another in a useful capacity, devoted but decidedly unromantic. Second, the love of the field of medicine.” She can almost hear him raising a palm in a careless shrug, a considered nonchalance that’s anything but. Pantomime performance. Facing him in person would be difficult; something about him makes her bristle, clench her teeth. “These are things that make life worth living to me; most people have erratic emotions and motives.”

“It’s respectable, but unusual. Not that there isn’t a precedent. If we think of famous scientists, artists, and individuals knowledgeable and devoted to their craft, it’s a different type of fulfillment involved. And many of them did have poor relationships and lives, multiple wives for instance. Addiction.”

“Aptly said, Sakura. Another instance that I’d say you may have your own void in need of exploration.”

Pursing her lips, her response comes with a bite. “Another swing and miss, Kabuto.”

Again, she feels him shrug, retreat from the line. Voice dripping slimy and conciliatory as he snarks, “I suppose I did offer myself up, and not you, after all.”

“I think it’s time for the next,” she says, infusing civil kindness in the shift. “Looks like you’ve begun quite the conversation, because lines are lighting up. Have a good night.”

_Click._

Her companion in the booth holds up a hand with two fingers — two minutes, 120 seconds, a breather. Removing her headphones from around her neck, she stands and stretches. Crossing the room, she opens the door and pokes her head over the threshold.

“You got a message,” he says. “A strange man called with a rebuttal to the last guy’s arguments. Some rant about how art is the highest form of affection and he had no vision . . . really weird.”

“Huh. I guess he wasn’t comfortable speaking on the show?”

Raising his eyebrows, he runs a hand through his messy hair and smiles. Approaching his mid-thirties and always laboring under a stoic but world-weary demeanor, his slight detachment always rings as the conscientious but awkward treatment from a father who’s never home to tuck in his children. “He used the word explosion, so I didn’t find him particularly _stable._ ”

Sakura flashes a smile. “I’m back on in a second. Thanks for the interception.”

Waving a blithe hand, he gives her a chuckle — again so much like a well-meaning father. A pang of guilt, the origin of which she’s never sure of, as if he can see through the meticulous cosmetic visage prepared for later, can spot the glitter still lingering in the microscopic creases of her skin. As if he knows what’s buried at the bottom of her bag and has an inkling of her messy tryst and possibly destructive habits.

When she takes her place at the desk, settles the headphones onto her ears and gives him a thumbs-up, her foot brushes against the daybag propped underneath. 

_Click._

“And we’re back on this chilly Thursday evening, discussing the interplay of biology in the complex concept of love. Before we were specifically talking about how much of this process is truly in our control, and the different types of bonds that can form that don’t meet expectations of our classic ideas of romance. Kabuto, if you’re still listening — someone felt that art should be placed on the shelf over medicine. Not sure how you would feel about that! So we’re on to the next . . .”

Pausing for a moment, she waits for her companion to send over the new caller; meeting eyes through the glass, he does so with a careless shrug, as if saying, _Sure, why not?_

A flash of irritation: Stoic but waffling, an annoying combination. Sakura’s convinced he has a daughter at home he’s never learned how to communicate with; he strikes her as single-dad, not much extended family, sheepish in the face of attitude. She’s unable to deny that he has a certain sturdiness he brings to long nights; if she wasn’t so sure he would twist in knots at the mere hint of impropriety, she could see him asking after her sleep habits and vegetable servings. She, a prickly young woman and he, an awkward parent. 

But she wishes — oh, she wishes he hadn’t let this call through, that his protective sense piqued just once at the correct juncture.

“Pardon, I didn’t catch your name,” Sakura says. Listening to the strange breathing on the other side of the line. Rolling her eyes to her call screener, he puts his hands together and dips his head in apology. 

It continues, different and yet similar from a behavior before. _Sasuke?_ She’s not so sure she’s willing to gamble on it though, professionalism notwithstanding. A rattle, a cadence unknown. _Even silence has its own sound._

“Hello?” 

“I’m here.” 

In instinct her fingers curl into fists, green fingernails digging into the skin of her palms. Sharp. It distracts her from the way she yearns to kick her chair back and run. Perhaps it’s painted all over her face in vivid color, a portrait, all shadows and deep rivulets and frozen fear, dimly aware of eyes on her.

“S-sorry about that. Poor connection, maybe.” A smooth response she pours an easy smile into, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

“No, I don’t think so. I promise I’m not here to scare you, though.”

A richness, a distinct and familiar quality, a sinister veneer of kindness — does he hear the falter in her own? Is she crazy to feel ready to run? 

Chancing a throaty laugh, she says, “I should hope not. Seems like strangers in the night enjoy talking about love and loneliness. At least it always ends up that way.”

The man on the phone makes a dulcet noise of amusement, triggering a shiver that, while embodying the same tone she’s so used to from the man with which she spends most (lately, too many) nights, has something else. A quality that’s cold and dead where Sasuke’s reflects the opposite. Sakura thinks of resting a finger on the button and letting it slip, disconnecting from this, _it_ , severing the connection.

“I’m sure you’ve heard before of what that says about you.”

Biting her lip, she struggles not to imbue a response with the same sharpness. “True; the woes of the host! But the show isn’t about me — it’s about all of you.”

“Tell me,” he says, breezing past her conciliatory words, “do you think that people are locked in by their destiny? Before, the orphan and his self-admitted devotion to something beyond? Incapable of regular relationships or just caught in a web of something else’s choosing?”

“I . . . like to think that we have more choice than that.”

“Is that what you tell yourself? That you choose these things, and each fork in the road is a decision you make, not one made for you? That you’re not caught in something larger than yourself, a web you stumbled into?”

It has a question underneath.

“Let me elaborate,” he continues. Bitterness with a jovial veneer: Playacting. “Do you think meetings and falling in love are coincidences, occurrences, or divine intervention?”

Sakura’s laugh is genuine this time, bold. A touch of amusement. “These sound like stories more than they sound like evidence! They’re not new ideas, of course: Literature in particular discusses all of these thematic possibilities, romantic but not well-supported in reality.” 

“I wonder,” he says, unctuous. Sets her stomach roiling, like he’s in the room.

“Sure, there are events that happen with no true explanation. None rooted in evidence, anyway, unlike the things we were discussing earlier.” Sakura’s throat dries out at the close, and she swallows.

“‘Chaste and temperate people — not of their own will — fall in love, badly.’ You probably know that one, as well-read as you are.”

The copy of her book, given as a gift, sits on the bedside table in a room across the city in the apartment of the boy in love that handed it to her — the man that touches her like fire. She senses a string visible only in the light, bonding her to him, a tripwire strung by fate.

“Funny that it’s on the theme of ruining a house, a family name. That sounds so old-fashioned, doesn’t it?”

Goading her with the details he knows. She’s shaking for reasons she can’t understand, a quaking in the marrow. 

Lowering his voice an octave, it claws like the night. 

“Girl,” he hisses, “do you believe in curses?”

_Click._

She gasps, gulping in air as if breaking the surface of water. Vision swimming, she realizes it wasn’t her who hit the disconnect. As he shoves back his chair and opens the door, she gropes for her own controls and hears herself rattle off something about how unfortunately, the connection was lost, and they’ll be cutting to the music early.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have let him come through. What a strange man,” he says. Not coming too close, but after a moment he kneels down to her height. “Are you all right, Sakura? You look . . .”

“Fine.” Regretting the curtness. Inhaling and exhaling in a slow, measured breath, she flashes another thin smile. “I’m okay. Promise. It just . . . really caught me off guard. People are always odd but he was just plain creepy.”

Pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes, she imagines drowning in the bursting color. When she refocuses, her night partner has a glass of water and a bag of — 

“Walnuts?” she asks. “Why walnuts?”

Shrugs. “They’re my favorite. You look pale; eat something.”

Acquiescing, she takes a few and chews them without tasting, lost in the accusing tones of a voice black as oily pitch.

This. 

This is what she never used to do.

It’s not the activity itself — it’s the tang of too many gimlets and the glitter that she drags from floor to floor, the stardust sparkles taking refuge in her hair and skin. The press of bodies that she doesn’t know, will never know, the painful pressure valve release. If she closes her eyes and succumbs to the spin, the sensation of loosening from orbit and going on the float, she manages to pretend she doesn’t even know herself.

All she can think of is home. What and where is that? It’s certainly not here, where her beautiful shoes have difficulty parting ways from the sticky floor. It’s not the apartment in a neighborhood full of people starving and ill, nor her roommates that pass her most often as ships in the night; not anywhere. 

The only thing that makes sense is her lovely, delinquent chemical adventure, yet it will be sabotaged like everything else. 

Sakura thinks of his eyes, his hands, his skin. All of it could be here if she asked; she’s sure he would put up with so many things, if she _asked._

Instead she brushes the skin and sweat of strangers, a roiling mass of bodies supporting one another as an ocean wave, losing themselves in emotions larger than what one can feel alone.

Her knees tremble; plagued by head spins, this is preferable to thinking.

When she takes a seat on a couch and settles into the cushion, one arm parallel, propped across the back, she rolls her ankle in a circular stretch. Pithy, ignorable. It’s nothing compared to how a heart carries pain, such a different animal. 

Someone emerges from the alternating lights and gloom, placing a napkin on the low table in front of her and setting a drink, the same she’s been having all night, all morning. Questioning him with her eyes, he nods his chin behind her and melts away into the noise.

As she turns her head, a hand comes down on hers, the one resting on the back of the couch, and the force of it knives her gut, right under the ribs.

“Look straight ahead.”

Twisting angrily, she pulls; whoever it is digs the heel of his hand into her knuckles. Unable to see his face, she opens her mouth until his other hand settles on her shoulder, draping itself in a way that to anyone else would appear friendly, at worst a bit salacious. 

“Let go of me.”

“Will you use those wild hands on me, girl?”

“What do you think?”

The grip on her shoulder tightens. Desperately wanting to flail, fight, but his unspoken threat is no bluff. The twisting sensation vibrates and transforms into nausea, a lump in her throat. Unless there’s someone in that mass of bodies tonight that feels like being a hero, she’s stuck staring straight ahead.

“That’s quite a heartbeat. Nervous, I bet.”

“Who are you?”

“You can’t tell? We just spoke.” He sighs with a hint of amusement. “You’re familiar with so many of us now, this should be easy for you.”

_Do you believe in curses, girl?_

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.” A lie, and not a very good one. Sakura swallows hard.

“Not a very good liar. What is it with you and this family?”

She forces out a dark laugh. “Maybe you’re cursed.”

“I’d argue we’ve been cursed by you. I’m here to tell you to stop. You’re smart enough to let this go, like you let go of everything else. Do what you do — crawl back to who you were.”

“I don’t care about any of you.” Eyes flashing, speaking through a fake smile. “I never started it; I was a child! And not that it’s your business, but I’ve moved on to something new.”

His chuckle is foreboding, makes her feel sick. “Maybe you’re not so bright, then. You can’t even see it. That it’s something old, something blue. Is that how that silly rhyme goes?”

“If we’re going to be here a while, could I at least have the drink you so _kindly_ brought me?”

“You’re a spitfire, aren’t you?” he hisses, tightening his grip. Hot breath ruffling locks of her hair. “You’re mouthy.”

“And I’ll scream, too.” True to form, her voice is a spit and she shrugs him off her shoulder. Surprisingly, he lets her go. 

A pause, a deafening silence. She feels him begin to move away, and like the waiter she knows without seeing him that he’s melting away into the dark. Waiting for his inevitable departing words, but they never come.

She waits a full minute before leaping up and bolting across the dance floor.

Down a hallway, pressed with bodies and couples and partners lost in drunken and drugged hazes. Hot, chaotic. Using her elbows to push them aside to fight to the back door. Lets her full weight fall into the door and swings it open into the alley, and it takes her a while to realize the alarms bursting against the muted music is her doing. Too disassociated, too tipsy. 

Crouching, leaning against the brick, she fumbles with the phone due to trembling, going right for the number out of a blurry list of them — none saved. All starting with a mishmash of area codes from the bonds she never takes with her. Except she knows the only one that matters.

She swallows a sob lingering in her throat. The emergency alarms tune in and out like a touchy radio.

“What’s wrong?”

Relief — his voice brings nothing but. Forgetting her own rules, she tries to tamp the fear encircling everything she wants to say. 

“Can you come?” Feeling pathetic, scared. 

“Tell me where you are, Sakura.”

Her mind on autopilot saves her, rattling off the address without pause like someone else speaking. 

“I’m coming. Don’t move from where you are unless it’s dangerous.” 

Silence strings between them, all the words that need to be said.

“Did I wake you?” Sakura asks quietly.

She imagines him shrugging, the way he looks away in lieu of focusing on her, like she’s too bright and he’s too shy. Or perhaps she’ll see the shadows.

“I wasn’t asleep. Frankly, I don’t sleep well at all. Lately, it’s been better.” Pauses again, inhaling, exhaling. “Something about that guy on your show bothered me. When you didn’t return, I didn’t want to assume — well, you go where you go.”

But Sakura hears in his voice how much he hates it. An admonition and ache all in one, the brusque admission that offers a glimpse of his heart.

“Sasuke—”

“Just stay there. You’ll be all right until I come.” She can almost hear what for him is as close to a smile as he gets. “You’re not a weak woman, after all. So hold on.”

The sensation of a rope around the neck loosens slightly, retreating. Readjusting on her haunches, she stares up at the stars, words surfacing and drowning in her addled daze

_you have ruined her and me and all this house_

“Sakura?”

Even in her precarious place, the burning in her chest and the wobbling in her legs, his voice still scatters gooseflesh on her hot, glittered skin.

“What did you say?” he asks sharply. “You’re fading. Keep yourself together.”

“Nothing,” she murmurs. “I’ll see you soon.”

Disconnecting the call, she presses the phone against her head, the fingers of her other hand weaving through her hair and tugging it over her face.

This is how Sasuke finds her, still crouching against the brick alley wall, bent and frozen. A grumpy security guard stands a couple of feet away from the open door, scowling at him as if her state is his doing. 

“Tried to get your girl to sit inside — she’s not talkin’ much.”

Wrapping his coat around her, she listens to his instructions as in a dream, without reaction or pause. With a dismissive wave toward the guard, he whisks her away and gets a shrug in response. 

To the curb, in the car. The grip on her face is tighter than he means, the worry in his voice rougher than he intends; it always comes back, the sovereignty of his name, the resources he invokes as he wishes and when it suits him, hates and indulges. Intensity and arrogance and obsessive love bred in his bones. 

But he swipes a gentle thumb underneath her eye, stardust and tears, and somehow even this doesn’t look bad on her. Even this way, she’s divine, inhuman, special underneath whatever pressure made her — a diamond.

“Sasuke.”

Her voice is the throaty scrape of sandpaper, leading him off the path and into the water, drowning and purifying but for a man like him, it’s always doomed to be one and the same.

“Thank you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> opening song is "Special" by Simple Creatures


	7. VII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I want to see you,” Sakura whispers, “when you take something you really want.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> t e n s i o n

VII.

 _When I'm six feet underneath my misery —  
_ _Come on hit me with adrenaline_

 _.  
_ _.  
_ _._

_She meets him when she's 13. Precocious, placed in a school among famous names and social leviathans where no one quite knows her, she devours books and builds her dreams._

_She meets him in the midst of an awakening: Learning all the ways boys say they love her and the ways men exert power, and the terror of becoming, of being seen._

_He meets her when he’s nearly 17. Idealistic, pacifistic but world-weary, he teeters on the edge of a cursed destiny he’ll take into his own hands._

_He meets her at his personal crossroads: Learning all the ways in which family evinces the truest darkness, unearthing the lies on which rests everything they’ve built._

_She’ll be the unraveling thread, and he’ll be the undoing of her dream._

❦

She awakens in the house of one man with the ghost of another lingering in her dreams.

In the dregs of fading sleep, as blanched white light seeps into the corners of her vision, peeling back her eyelids, she tastes his name on the tip of her tongue in a soft, overripe sweetness — old caramel, mottled fruit. Immiscible, then melting together at the close.

As if Sasuke can hear her vague and rimy thoughts, she blinks it all away and banishes it to the shadowy corners of her mind.

He’s out on the fire escape, having left the window open behind him. She observes him taking in the sun, shirtless, signaling his end of satisfying sleep and hers as well. Though many nights, oh, it feels almost felicitous, blessed, the sex _and_ the sleep. Better together.

Suddenly he’s staring back, and a pulse tears through her bones as though she’s just the conduit for something transcendent; whatever, exactly, she sees as she holds his gaze, those eyes. Dark and full of shadows, and even with the fear of so few hours ago rankling her mind, it all seems trivial in the whirlwind of her desire, the urge to paint him in brand new color.

Stepping down into the room, he comes to her with a careless sense of sovereignty and grace, the absolute ignorance of his own fuckability on full display as his hand takes her face with the same sort of gentle possessiveness as last night. While he frowns and thumbs something off her cheek, she imagines breaking his wrists in an impulsive coup to force those fingers where they _should_ be. 

“Glitter, still. Annoying.” 

“I’m guessing I wasn’t in the state to manage a shower last night?”

A divot appears between his brows. “Do you remember coming here?”

Tapping jade fingernails on her chin, she thinks. Embarrassment creeping in as she remembers how she must have looked, sounded, pathetic and terrified; asking him to pick her up from a club, intoxicated, crouching in an alley like a stupid mess. Crying? Crying. She recalls it all with uncomfortable clarity and reflects grimly that the overpriced gimlets only had one job and they couldn’t do the damn thing right. 

“Any chance you’ll just forget you ever saw me that way?” she asks, tears springing to her eyes. Lip trembling, she yanks up the collar of his shirt she’s wearing and hides her face. Adds a weak, futile attempt at a cough.

“Something in my eye. Throat, too,” she mumbles. He doesn’t press.

Sakura realizes she has one of his shirts on again and groans.

“What did I tell you, Sasuke?” 

Shrugging, he says, “I don’t care what you’ve told me. You asked for help. You come and go however you want, and I won’t stop you. I’ve said this.” 

“But — but — doesn’t it upset you? That I do this? And you let me do this to you? Come into your life and mess everything up?”

Something angry contorts his expression, and he kneels on the mattress with his face too close to hers. It prompts flashbacks of childish arguments, with his brother, with Naruto, anyone who would deign to scuffle with him.

“Why is it difficult for you to ask for help?”

“Don’t you do that,” she hisses. Rising to the occasion, to the crackle of heat and the promise of friction. Each word hits with the ring of dropped valuables, reverberating: “Pot, kettle, black." 

“I think you want a fight.”

“And you think you want me. But you’re wrong.”

She skewers him with her gaze, eyes alight. 

He fumes under her piercing expression, twisting under dual snakes of anger and fervor and why does love have all these muddled shades, running the gamut from tender to obsessive to violent to alien? 

His hands land on either side of her without warning, and he’s flush in her ear: 

“I make —” he hisses, “— my own choices, _Sakura._ ” Her name drips from his hot, furious mouth, viscid basalt. 

He pulls back, watching her lips twist and bright eyes flash in that way they do when she’s about to take him to task, whether with her wit or with those hips. Petulant, she crosses her legs and arms and gives him a withering glare that could still put him in the ground in a way he’d thank her for.

“Fine. Then . . . then you deserve to know some things,” she says softly. Relenting. Nodding to herself, willing the words to fall easy and open from her tongue. 

Sasuke holds up a hand as if placing her on pause, leaving the room without further explanation. The sounds of ceramic on countertops, the gentle grainy shuffle of sugar; he returns extending a steaming mug cradling coffee the color of tropical sand. 

She’s never had someone care about a thing so trivial, the preciseness of what seems like an unimportant preference. Taking it gently, she nods to the open window and takes his hand to lead him out; a spark when they touch, his other hand steadying the mug of his own. He returns to his original place and she blinks in the soft morning light, eyes green and dazzling as she contemplates the urban jungle and he commits her to memory just like this: Hair bright and disheveled, the sun a backdrop to splaying ends, pink flowers on fire; the graceful bass clef curve of her spine with her elbows resting on the gutted, rusted black iron bar; long _, long_ legs leading his eyes into the slope of her ankles.

Wondering how men possibly let her go.

The introduction is gentler this time, the wafting of a feather. Still with the tone of a story from a time before, the way she spoke on those train tracks.

“Like I’ve said,” she begins, “I grew up in a small place. Everyone knew each other, and people were generally kind, insofar as your life never gets too interesting. People didn’t keep secrets well. 

“I was smart — very smart. I was embarrassed and even now, it feels sour and difficult to say. My mother was always one for humility. When the school realized what they were dealing with, I did everything I could to take the opportunity. They were happy a kid from a town like that, a girl like _me,_ could make something of themselves.”

Sakura pauses, takes a sip of coffee. Brushes a knuckle against her lip. 

He watches from his corner.

“When you have something people want, or I guess, when you help them further their own needs, people want to use you. It’s seen as mutually beneficial even if the motives are selfish. Even if you’re just a little kid. Ino and I, we were friends before I made it into that school. For a girl who seemed larger than life — beautiful, fashionable, I was waiting for the day that friendship would wilt. We lived on opposite sides of metaphorical train tracks, an invisible line that separated us.”

She smiles. “But Ino’s good people. So I had at least one friend when I tested into the all-girl’s private school. The best in the region. Me, a nobody. A doctor . . . that’s what I always wanted to be. I was just a kid, commuting long hours and spending more time away from my bed than in it — but I never looked back. I told myself I’d do whatever it took to make something of myself and maybe, just maybe, make my mother proud.”

There, a familiar and perhaps universal yearning, seeking approval that never seems to come. Sasuke knows this all too well. Perhaps it’s something that transcends class and culture, the pathological neediness and the crushing disappointment when it’s never given. He sets his mug down on the iron floor and props his chin on his folded hands. Full attention.

“So,” and here she exhales shakily, “I start at this new school. It sounds dumb, I know, to be this nervous. But this was a completely different world. As far as I knew, these children were practically celebrities. For a long time I stayed away from people and things where I didn’t belong. Studied all the time, singularly focused on my goal. But Ino explained I had to make friends, and there were types of friends you had. Real ones, useful ones, important ones. To me, it was overwhelming. I’d never thought of anything that way. And to her credit, she kept bullies off my back; she believed in me.”

Her voice wavers and almost extinguishes in a whisper released from a mausoleum, a buried tomb.

“And then I met him.”

A searing in his gut — Sasuke’s expression stays stoic even as thoughts bubble and burst. Questions that of course are none of his business. But any fool can hear it, the implications of a gentleness like that. 

“A series of cliches,” she says, in a throaty, acerbic laugh. “A new student and an older tutor. I needed help, of course, in chemistry. One of the very few boys that was ever around an all-girls school, but he was also an intelligent, fantastic student, not to mention, per the whispers, an exceptional pedigree. But I knew none of those things the day I met him. Smart with books, stupid with boys.”

It must be a cruel fatal twist that she turns to look at him, both hands clutching the mug like it will crumble in her fingers. It helps her hide the shakes. He sees terror in her eyes, uncertainty as she faces him bare.

“Have you ever had a moment that you knew, you just _knew_ , that you irrevocably changed the course of your life?”

 _When I met you._ It doesn’t leave his lips, but it settles on her in the brilliant glitter in his dark eyes. Fire and brimstone. 

“So you know,” she says, rueful, “that it all runs away from you, and feels impossible to stop.”

Staring askance, unable to look him in the eye. While he’s beating the jealousy away, the ugly emotion solidifies in the middle of his chest in an unfathomably leaden weight.

“So, I meet him one day after school. He’s tall, dark-haired, has this — this such easy grace, gentleness. But there’s an edge somewhere, a shadow. And the feeling of a heavy burden, one he can’t share. As you can see,” and here her laugh catches him, snagging him as a fish on a hook, “my type is obvious. Predictable.”

Indicating him with her coffee mug, she gives Sasuke a wobbly smile.

Despite his jealousy, the corner of his lips pull into a smirk.

“We get to know one another. Looking back, I was so stupid. He tells me things that I sensed were secrets, but as a young girl you think that’s romantic — that he cares about you enough to let you in, that you’re special. And that’s it, you know? I felt out of place and insecure and he . . . made me feel special.”

She approaches on her long, lovely legs, kneels in front of him, setting the mug on the iron with a sharp clang. Plucking at the shirt, shrinking in it further, she tucks her legs underneath her to sit and look him in the eyes.

“He tells me how his father never wanted him to spend time volunteering, that it was a waste, but his mother encouraged it. That they have a lot of problems, familial, business, or otherwise. How he had begun to hate his place in society, and felt that he was walking toward a fate he couldn’t change. Sometimes we discussed chemistry. Sometimes, we talked about me. We entangled too deeply, and I didn’t understand I was getting too close. But I felt like I _knew_ him, understood him. And he doesn’t stop it.”

_When the black car stops at the end of the street, every hair on her body stands on end. Like an unearthly summons, a compelling soundless song._

_“Sorry, I have to—”_

_Ino snatches her wrist, yanking her close. Eyes like the ocean search her jade ones._

_“What are you doing, Sakura?” Voice drops lower. “Are you scared of him?”_

_How can she, at fourteen, articulate this? That they’re strung together by a series of unfortunate events, that she’s poured so much of herself in and he in turn has done the same to her, and she’s bound to him now? And somehow that it’s not what everyone thinks it is?_

_Because of course that’s how it will look._

_That the real crux of her fear is she knows what he’ll do, and she’s unable to stop it?_

_“He’s older,” Ino hisses. “And he’s an Uchiha.”_

_When he says Sakura’s name, and she turns to acknowledge him with a smile never quite shown to anyone else, Ino feels an innate and savage terror, the uncomfortable thrill and sense of danger._

Sasuke’s hand holds her face again, bringing her to the surface. Hot against her skin — cradle and crush.

“S-sorry,” she murmurs. Lips moving against his thumb, heated from the coffee. 

Both dazed in the haze of the creeping light, two people perched on the metal skeleton of the emergency stairs that’s cold against their bones, waiting for the other to turn the narrative’s page.

“He tells me too much,” she whispers. 

Sasuke’s eyes are black like pitch, and just as consuming. 

“His parents find out.”

And in spite of himself, he shifts closer as if twitched by strings. She doesn’t stop him.

“He tried to fix it, and all it did was get worse.”

The curiosity is secondary, a fleeting feeling subsumed by the anxiety and resentment over a boy from years and years ago that has no bearing on them, on this. No matter her protestations that it wasn’t what he thinks, his heart splits and opens into a gaping pit, jealousy so familiar it’s akin to all his years growing up, toddling and walking and running from point to point on an endless and blind timeline. Stepping in the footfalls of Uchiha boys and men before him, impelled on a path inset with tradition and piety and insanity. 

But he and his brother both slipped on the rocks, wings clipped, trying to break the chain of madness and following it all again, de novo. 

All the questions he can’t ask and knows aren't his business, but he’s angry and desperate and all of them seem worse than the one before — _did you want him did you want to marry him did he want you like I do and did you love him, did you_ **_love_ ** _him?_ Mind racing with thoughts he always swears she can hear, unearthly inference.

“He was in too much trouble. I never saw him again, or my family again, either. I stayed with Ino until I graduated, and then set off to never look back again.”

And so like all the men before him, he fails with his boundaries and indulges his selfish impulses like a drowning man desperate, clinging to the shipwreck that’s brought him the salt taste of something difficult to articulate. Following her off the cliff, hurtling toward the rocks.

Pressing his forehead against hers, hard, like he can slip under her skin and possess her for himself, he hisses: “Did you love him?”

He doesn’t remember her knees on either side of one of his, or register her fingers clinging to his chest to pry his soul apart. She fits into the planes and shadows of him, souls seeking home. Finds his weakest point and shatters him as glass. Always with her siren song, a tsunami dragging detritus out to shore in its wake. 

“No, Sasuke.”

She kisses him first, a musical score sliding andante to the close. An admission from her lips she pours into his — 

“Never the way I feel with you.”

It’s like she expects the way his hand leaves her face, sliding easily into the roots of her hair and grasps her to him, roughly, _his._ Loathes the way she lets him touch her like he’s normal. Still she insists on leading, though, as she straddles his thigh and fuck her damp heat is perilous and he rises to the occasion flush against her leg. Lets out something of a growl as her nails rake across the back of his neck — 

“I don’t know how you do this,” she says between touches of lips, “you make me so stupid.” 

She’s ethereal, he’s aphonic; all he manages is a coarse “Fuck.”

“Indeed.”

“We don’t—”

“We don’t what, Sasuke? Have to do this? You think I’m fragile? Are you afraid of me?” The end comes out in a hiss, eyes dancing with defiance. The roll of her hips rattles his breath into an angry stutter, and his fingers tighten her locks into a vice.

_Yes. Yes. Yes._

“What happened last night—”

“Has nothing to do with this.”

“I’m telling you—”

“Oh, you’re _telling_ me,” she repeats, swallowing down a breath. Grasps his hip bone, thumb firm against the taut adonis muscle leading to familiar stomping grounds. “Go on, then.”

She sees it, the way his eyes darken in color, nostrils flaring white, feels the coiling heat and intolerable atomic fission — a threat and promise all in one.

She so wants the consequences.

“I’ll find him.” In the shell of her ear, he affirms. “He won’t touch you.”

“Promises, hmm?”

Eyes black and wide as boundless space, angry with a savage glitter. Her _oh!_ of surprise when his hand steals under the hem of her shirt, fingers splaying across the hot skin of her stomach and climbing with a vengeful, impatient pace. 

“You,” he hisses, “have a mouth on you.”

“You would certainly kn—ah!” Stealing her next tart retort with a gesture just assertive enough to startle, force her into speechlessness. A pinch. She wishes he’d take her back inside; no, drag her in like conquered prey. And now her spine bends in a shape opposite of before, arching in the way of an untouched inlet or cove with all the rocks and crags as vertebrae, all the sharp edges of which he would endure to tear at and possess whatever’s inside. 

As his fingers coax another rock of her hips, the roll and swell of an ocean tide, she lets her eyes fall closed and struggles to keep the waver out of her spectral voice.

“You’re good like this too. Aggressive,” she purrs.

An irritated _shut up_ fades into irrelevance as he spies the last soft curve of her rib in the cage, pressing the bridge of his nose in the muscle and plush skin just below it. She tenses and lets fly another gasp, every tendon and limb caught in tremolo — stomach, spine, thighs and all the molten wet heat in between. 

“I want to see you,” Sakura whispers, “when you take something you really want.” 

Sasuke prepares to do exactly that, except there’s no way to kill this faster than his best friend’s obnoxious voice.

“Are you both out there? You have a perfectly good balcony to sit on, weirdo,” Naruto crows. Arms against the frame, leaning forward out the open window, he pauses to take in the state of them, frowns, and then locks eyes with Sakura. 

She considers, as she stares at his sparkling eyes fading into keen and surprisingly quick understanding, that if the entire fixture came loose from the building, she’d welcome fate’s timely intervention with open arms. 

“Oh boy.” 

“Naruto—!"

“Are they both out there?”

Sakura grimaces as if she’s had a tooth ripped out sans anesthesia. In a flash, she palms Naruto’s entire face and shoves him back inside; the sound of his yelp upon cracking his head on the window feels deserved.

They untangle and pull apart, radiating heat. She trails her fingers from his collarbone in a languid, winding spoor toward his hips. When he jerks away, she hooks a finger in his waistband and yanks him closer to feel him hard against her.

“I’ll herd them into the kitchen,” she says. “Will let them know you need a minute; you’re indisposed.” 

Placing a hand on the upper window, she begins to lower herself into his room.

Sasuke groans at all of it — his life, his friends, this girl. “‘Them?’”

“The gang’s all here!” Sticking out her tongue, she clambers over the sill. Her voice rings sharp as she shoos them away. 

Sasuke stares at the tangled metal staircase beneath his feet, wondering if pitching himself off it would be easier than going inside and watching them drink all his good coffee. 

Embarrassment abounds, but it still loses. As he locks up the window from the inside, he watches Sakura shove Ino out the bedroom door as she attempts to get a glimpse of Sasuke; she nearly breaks her neck when her head whips around to try. 

One _click_ sounds off the heels of another as they preserve their space. Sighing, she crosses to the closet and tosses open the doors in search of, presumably, her clothes; they’re not in their usual pile on the floor. But something gives her pause, and her hands fall to her sides as she takes a small step in, almost wary.

Everything hung up on one side, grouped by type. She steps forward and plucks the sleeve of a blouse in her fingers, caressing the fabric. Eyes sweeping it from one end to the other, the carved out space for her belongings given freely, and she’s almost sure she spies an outfit she effused over, admired, so _wanted_ , but did not buy, a jumpsuit peeking among evenly racked hangers. 

Before she can whirl around to protest, chastise, his arms snake around her in a persuasive embrace, the fingers of one hand draped on the hollow of her throat with the others splayed again across skin stippled with shifting glitter. 

With his breath in her ear and the caffeine, her heartbeat again kicks out of control.

“You . . . can’t do things like this.”

“Well, they can’t be on my floor. Messy.”

“Sasuke,” she sputters, “the gifts! Sharing your space? It’s too . . . intimate.”

He makes a sound that bursts as a dark, amused catch of air. Perhaps it’s a laugh.

“Considering this,” he says quietly, “that’s rich.”

“Sasuke.” Tries to make it sound authoritative, but it’s fruitless in the wake of this, of him — she, fitting so easily into the planes and bends of him. Separation would doom them both. 

“Then tell me to stop, Sakura.” And in boldness that surprises even himself, he takes her chin aggressively, holding her in place. The voice that emerges almost channels someone else, a portent ancient, seeping and damned. “Say the word.” 

Caught in him, calloused fingers on her lips and those of the other hand rough and resolute as they skirt her skin as a mere suggestion and touch her boldly, without warning, buckling her knees and tearing a moan from her throat. Everything slick and bright as his fingers continue and her skin is buzzing and her fingers yank his hair, scrape his scalp, and this time she might just let him take her apart piece by piece — 

At the abrupt knock on the door and cascading, fulgent tones, their friends chattering as birds, Sasuke releases her. She curses. Separating, aiming to make themselves presentable, he keeps eyes on her as she pulls on clothing with an unreadable, neutral expression. He wonders if it was too much, that whatever he’s loosened the chain on is something darker than he knows, sinister. It’s difficult to know where this comes from, this compulsion and mania.

Sakura jumps to pull on her jeans, yanks the rest of her hair through the shirt’s collar and shakes it out. Regards him for a few seconds that stretch in an endless, flat misery.

“Ah, you know what I wish?” She tucks pink hair behind her ear, watching him out of the corners of her green, bright eyes.

A sensation roils in his stomach — stupid, sick. “Sakura, I—”

“That our idiotic, well-meaning friends weren’t here,” she starts, closing the gap between them, 

“so you could tear off every piece of clothing I just put on, and lay me _everywhere_ ,” 

and now she’s in his ear, singing of calamity and fire,

“fill me with all the things you were promising, and,”

these words are only for his ears, speaking supplications that he drinks with impunity and his heart gives out in the wake of her demands — 

_take me_

_fuck me_

_like I’m the only woman left on this earth_

_like I’m the only thing you love._

When she leaves the room, preventing further chaos in their wake, he’d say he’s already long dead, if not for the fact that he’s grasping the hard proof in his stupid, disloyal hand. 

“First of all,” Ino says as Sasuke walks in, damp and dressed, “do you know my father and Shikamaru’s work together? Small world, huh?”

In comparison to his morning, everything else has the drab quality of watching paint primer dry. Supplying a grunt of faked interest, he goes directly to the kitchen and avoids the room’s eyes and expressions of interest. Sakura’s perched on the arm of the couch while Ino’s sunken into the comfortable cushion next to her. Naruto’s on a stool and Shikamaru occupies an armchair in typical languid repose, and Sasuke’s not sure if it’s less or more agonizing that no one says a thing.

“Oh, you’re out.” Naruto slurps his coffee as Sasuke shakes the empty airtight container, woefully emptied of beans. 

Sharply hitting it against the counter, Sasuke closes his eyes. 

“Try the cabinet to your right,” Sakura suggests.

When he locates the new one — same roast, sealed and untouched — he remembers how she just left him and now he’s staring at her across the room. Cursed, cursed, cursed.

Ino watches with a grin and flashes a look at Naruto, who returns it over the rim of his mug.

“Second,” Ino continues, “Sakura, you said you were coming down tonight, right?”

Sakura blinks, crashing back to earth. “Oh, yeah?”

Ino taps her opposite wrist to indicate a nonexistent watch. “You _said_ you would spend time with me before your event. Plus, you have to let me dress you up! I need to live vicariously through you.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do.” Grinning down at her, Sakura’s rewarded with Ino’s playful smile that wants to address the elephant in the room.

“Third,” Shikamaru says, raising a halfhearted hand, “I warned them, for the record.”

Naruto scoffs. “What’s the use of an emergency key if I have to knock to use it? Emergencies aren’t planned.”

“Brilliant,” Sasuke snaps. “Nobel Prize-winning logic.” 

Now Naruto frowns. “Shouldn’t you be in, like, a way better mood?”

Shikamaru kicks him lazily with his heel, shaking his head. “Knock it off.”

“Let me pack, then.” Sliding from her perch onto her feet, Sakura heads into Sasuke’s bedroom with Ino on her heels; the latter’s smiling ear to ear, perhaps at the prospect of seeing his personal belongings, and clenches a triumphant fist.

Sasuke joins them and takes up Ino’s vacated space. Naruto leans forward conspiratorially.

“Hey—”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I’m about to say!”

“Don’t care.”

“I was just going to say don’t steal all the spotlight at this thing! Shikamaru’s woman is going to be there and everyone’s always looking right at you at these things. Literally every party we ever went to,” he adds to Shikamaru in an undertone, as if Sasuke isn’t able to hear.

“Listen,” Sasuke growls, “I don’t steal shit. They don’t leave me alone.”

“Sure, but it’s still annoying.”

“Also, I don’t even know who your girlfriend is.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.” Shikamaru’s eyes are closed, but he readies another heel kick at Naruto just in case. 

“Oh, geez, you sound like Sasuke now. You’re both bullshit.” Naruto sits up straight and bounces his shoulders with a fox-like grin. “So our lazy resident smoker is seeing the sister of a famous oil tycoon.”

“Ah, I can’t have anything nice,” Shikamaru sighs. 

In a stage whisper, Naruto cups a hand over his mouth. “She couldn’t bring him, and he’s salty ‘bout it.”

“I didn’t _want_ to go. I mean, a night of people standing around talking about things they don’t care about, pretending they’re friendly. Then I have to dress up and be on point and, ugh, what a total hassle. Boring. No offense,” he adds hastily as the women cross the threshold. 

Sakura shrugs, setting her suitcase upright. “None taken.”

“Sometimes we do the devil’s work,” Ino says dreamily. “If it involves fancy clothes, I’ll bear it. Well, she will, and I’ll wait for my gossip spoils.”

“I wish you could come.” Sakura frowns. “You’re better at this.”

Ino waves it away. “We should head downtown.”

The group says goodbyes; Sakura touches Sasuke’s shoulder and their eyes meet. He’s sure his heart doesn’t quite work properly anymore, and can’t locate his voice to muster up a response when she says she’ll see him tomorrow night. 

Naruto rolls his eyes at the close of the apartment’s door. “That’s how you say goodbye to the love of your life? You really piss me off.” 

But Sasuke’s lost in thought, and his eyes narrow as he steels himself to speak. 

“Listen.” 

Perhaps it’s his tone, low and dark. Naruto tilts his head and Shikamaru opens one eye.

“Something happened last night that bothered me. I want your help.”

“What’d she do to you this time?” Naruto jokes. 

Setting his chin on steepled fingers, Sasuke glowers at him. 

“Kidding. Sort of.”

“Someone is stalking her,” he says through clenched teeth. 

“Sakura, you mean?” Naruto jerks a thumb at the door they departed from. “What? She didn’t say anything. What happened?”

“He called into her show; found her at a club. All I have to go on is what she told me so far.” Shakes his head, turning it all over in his mind. “I want footage. I want traces.”

Shikamaru sighs and pulls himself out of his sprawling slouch. Elbows on knees, he levels with Sasuke, mirroring physicality to level with him properly. “She’s probably unsettled. And you want to help her, I get that. But don’t you think, and hear me out, it might not be your business?”

“Shikamaru, this guy’s a freak, obviously!”

“Right,” he says, holding out a placating hand to Naruto’s outburst. “But did she actually ask for your help?”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying,” he says, slow and in careful syllables, “that maybe we can start by just asking around. Questions. Quietly. We don’t need to go scorched earth on something we don’t know much about. Then you also don’t seem . . .” He trails off. 

Eyes charcoal, sparks on flint: Sasuke snaps at him. “Seem what?”

Shikamaru inhales, holds, and exhales for a long moment. 

“Obsessive.” 

The following night, he finds himself staring into a garbage can housing a small bonfire of thick and full envelopes; Naruto claps his best friend on the shoulder and peers inside.

“You haven’t looked at a single one?”

Sasuke shakes his head, flicking Naruto and an errant grey ash off his suit jacket. 

“I’d be too curious. But I get it. We left all that behind, you know?” 

Continuing his silence, Sasuke nods in response. 

“You better be more charming than that tonight. Yeesh.” 

“You’re going to smell like smoke,” Shikamaru drawls, exhaling the wisps of his own cigarette. “Get out of here.”

Bidding them goodbye without fanfare, a bag slung over his shoulder, he opts to walk a few blocks before subjecting himself to sitting in traffic in the back of a car. He clenches and unclenches his fingers — they’ve been intermittently numb for the last hour or so, and he’s fairly sure he has heartburn. If this is love, he might succumb to it as a disease. 

Time passes in jittery film frames. Quick-cut thoughts intrude his mind as he stares out the window. The driver navigates, he perseverates. Like shredding paper, they uncurl and pile and come to rest.

_“You won’t waste your time with that, Itachi.”_

_Sasuke’s eye watches through the space between the door and the frame._

_His mother fixes his father with a kind but firm expression. “Fugaku. If he wants to help others, let him. It looks good on his transcripts, anyway. Don’t be unreasonable.”_

_For a moment, Sasuke thinks he’ll yell at her, though he very rarely does. She’s spared often, a mercy that his sons, especially him, don’t receive._

_Mikoto winks at Itachi, knowing she’s succeeded, and Itachi sees his little brother watching._

A lurch, and the car comes to a hard stop that unsettles his gut, starts his intestines writhing. Swallowing, pushing off a strange cold sweat and feverish shiver all in one, he begins to dig in his pockets.

“Sorry, sir. Downtown, Friday night traffic.”

“Fine,” he responds. Brandishing several bills, he unhooks his seatbelt. “I’ll walk the rest.”

The driver takes them, watching him closely. “If you’re sure. You all right?”

Without another word, Sasuke swings open the door and hits the sidewalk in a brisk stride. 

He observes the skyline of hotels on the way to his own, bag slung over his back, dodging young couples and harried businessmen and work crowds. In a relative daze, he steps into the lobby with paying much mind to anything else. 

He waits in line, but when he reaches the front desk the young girl seems starstruck, closing her mouth after it falls open before launching into babbling speech.

“Uchiha Sasuke, you said? Oh! You didn’t have to wait, just let us know you’re here. Ack! But of course, sir, you can do whatever you want—”

“It’s fine,” he says. “I’m waiting for someone.”

“Ahh, are you?” A tinge of disappointment in her voice. 

“Could you have this taken up? There’ll be another bag as well.”

“Of course. Can I get you anything while you wait? Would you like to sit at the bar, or in a dining room?”

“No thanks,” he sighs. Laughable, a drink; god would it taste good, but sure wouldn’t help the lack of feeling in his hands.

Instead he takes up a seat in a hushed area of the lobby. The murmurs of people on phones provides a warm idle — calls to loved ones, to business partners on the other side of the globe, the amalgam of languages and inflections at a soft rumble. Fireplace crackling merrily. Sasuke keeps his eyes on the front doors.

Someone in an armchair across from him makes a noise. A snicker, maybe. Grey messy hair and the bit of his face that’s visible reveal only the finest lines, but he still has the gravitas of an older, seasoned man. 

Distracted, Sasuke frowns at the mask he’s wearing, and it sinks in more deeply as he catches the title. Rolling his eyes, he shifts his body away from him as if he’ll catch the perversion evident by what he’s chosen to read in public.

A flutter of activity draws Sasuke’s eyes. The sound of suitcase wheels and a throng of people at the desk now, a flash of shiny blonde hair and there, a glimpse of pink. 

Now this grey-haired man has twisted around in his seat. A bit taller, he can see over some of the heads. With a wistful sound, he says, “When did I get so old?”

“Excuse me?” Sasuke says it without thinking, a terse response.

Turns his book upside-down on his knee, spine facing up, pages spread. He chuckles, and Sasuke can swear he’s heard it somewhere before. “It’s a young person’s game. The chase, the chaos. I’m too tired for women like this, but they still want to make even an old man jump out of his seat, stand to attention.”

Sasuke, catching a glimpse of an arm and tiny wrist, pink locks, and a man trying to kindly relieve her of a suitcase she seems reluctant to give, shakes his head. “Shut up.”

Sasuke’s stopped listening, and his unwanted companion notices. Chuckling again, picking up his book to resume, he waves him away like an undesired gnat. “Go on, then, to your doom.”

But Sasuke’s already on his feet, still with those numb hands as he shoulders his way through what sounds like a newly-arrived group of tourists swarming the desk. 

A hand still on the suitcase that the porter keeps trying to relieve her of, Ino with a sassy hand held up against the front desk girl’s faltering prattle. Sakura pouts a little, lips pursed, wrapped up in a long belted coat. Sasuke’s intent to intervene is sidetracked when his gaze snags on the curve of her calf melting into ankles hemmed in by black heels that the foolish part of him would abandon this entire social affair for if they could just be propped up on his shoulders — 

“Mr. Uchiha?” Front desk girl looks relieved, and Sakura’s so surprised that her grip relents on the suitcase; the porter whisks it away. 

“Sasuke?”

He remembers his mother always telling him to lift his chin, face forward, be proud. _Come take your place, Sasuke._

She remembers her mother always telling her to keep her eyes down, to not draw attention. It was Ino that gave her the ribbon to tie up her hair and face what came. _Go take your place; you belong here, Forehead._

Another manager herds the tourists to a different desk, trying to settle the busy city evening din. 

Why, when they greet one another after any stretch of time it feels fated? If they were unbridled, wild animals engaging on the plains, they’d be circling one another with locked eyes. Hers, bright and lucid, take in the fit of his suit, skirt the shape of his shoulders, his clear talent with a tie; always she has the way of beholding him that strips him down to white glossy bone. 

When she smiles, his back feels straighter, his chin lifts higher. His world is only second to her reign.

“They’ll take it up to our suite. I didn’t mention it.”

Now she beams. “I should’ve known. You’re so very meticulous.”

Ino’s watching, and the front desk girl is too. 

Raising a finger, Sakura asks, “Do we need to finish check-in, or—?” 

“Taken care of. We can head there whenever you want.”

“Excuse me, not without photos! Wait.” Unzipping her coat, Ino shrugs out of it to reveal a deep plum jumpsuit with a plunging neckline. She tosses it into the arms of a new porter that seems to arrive from another dimension just for this task. “Hold this, please.”

Sakura smirks at Ino. “He’ll like that.”

“Focus on your own night, take off that coat. Sasuke, fix your tie. And your hair. Your face is fine, of course.” 

Unbelting her jacket, he can swear Sakura winks at him.

“You are incredible,” Ino says, clicking her tongue at Sasuke’s ensemble. “Impeccable genetics. Don’t make that face! I call it as I see it.” 

“Thank you,” Sakura says to whomever takes her coat.

And now he receives his first full look at her, entranced as if she’s shed an outer shell or skin. A hum in the universe matching the tone of his pulse, an empyrean premonition. Eyes and necks rivet in her direction, in passing, lingering as his do — the ivory glimmer of skin brushed and dusted with faint pink, the shy hint to the shade of her actual dress, rich and red and rust and lust. Fabric delicate and tensile over the devastating slope and camber from waist to hip, as if restraining some unruly divinity. Shoulders bare sans the bright curtain of hair she cascades over one of them, sleeves feathered and formed across her upper arms illusioning the opening of a flower, the splitting of an atom, the cracking of the earth. 

The clandestine slit above one knee, just perilous enough on legs like these. 

Lips painted in ochre, lashes dipped in ink. Skin as porcelain and ice. 

The color of passion, royalty, luxury, blood. Depending on one’s preferred history, it travels the world on a string with a narrative suited to each and all. 

_Go on, then, to your doom._

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Opening lyric couplet is "Adrenaline" by Simple Creatures. As far as ages there's obviously some liberties here, I didn't feel like sticking to exact timelines for massacres and whatnot for the story being told. I'm just going to have to make a playlist for all of these songs to keep them together and also acknowledge music that has an influence but doesn't make it in here, hah. I'll totally admit that the next chapter might take longer because I'd like to keep the whole event together. Also will admit I started some little oneshot things that I'd like to give some attention - dk if I'll post them but I'm sure eventually they'll find their way on here or on Twitter.
> 
> These chapters keep ending up longer than I plan at the outset but I'm having fun, so if you are too then it's all great I suppose


	8. VIII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “And I’m still being an idiot, because I’m here coming after you.”
> 
> And they’re kissing again, less gentle than before as he takes her by the hair and there and always, the ever-present ache in his tongue and lips as if he can extract her essence, drink the dregs. It occurs to her there are rooms everywhere here — 
> 
> “You’re annoying,” he says against her lips, the ones still red and pristine. “But not an idiot.”

VIII.

 _You’re just a crater of yourself, and  
_ _she’s the fallen angel underneath._

❦

The tingling of circulation returns, blood seeking its biological home. Sasuke can feel his hands again, and all he’s thinking about is putting them on her. 

By the night’s blessing and perhaps Ino’s, he’ll have his chance.

“Pick your jaw up off the floor, go stand with her. This is really at Naruto’s request.”

Sakura’s hand reaches for his and they connect in that instant, always like treacherous atoms brushing in ways they shouldn’t. His body’s training begins to catch up, always before the mind, arm finding its way around the slope of her waist. He’s no stranger to events, dances, traditions, but her presence is always dredging up something different, untamed.

Heat dashes across the back of his neck. Frowning, he watches Ino fiddle with her phone. “Naruto?”

Brandishing it at him in amusement, she tosses her long blonde hair over her shoulder. 

“He wanted proof that you’d _show_ up and that she wouldn’t _stand_ you up.” 

Sakura stifles a giggle. Sasuke mutters something under his breath, and startles when he hears the repetitive shuttering noise of Ino pressing the camera button. 

“I’ll just choose the best ones,” she says, anticipating Sasuke’s protests.

Draping a hand on his chest, Sakura presses her lips to his cheek — electricity bursts, percussing down each bone in his spine in time with the shutter click. 

Ino moans. “Stop being so attractive, you two. That’s a great one!” 

Toying with his messy hair, Sakura watches him out of the corner of her eye. 

“It didn’t leave a trace. Good.”

It takes a moment to realize what she’s talking about. He raises a hand to his cheek and swipes with his fingers, but it yields nothing. 

“Ah, your lipstick.” 

“Just want to make sure it stays all night.”

A flicker, overturned coals stoking fire underneath. It escapes in a voice low and rich that surprises him, faltering Ino’s indulgent photography.

“I’m sure we can put it to the test.”

The faint pink dusting her cheeks signals that his boldness hits the mark — the voracity dancing in her eyes is bountiful, a gift. Alms to those bereft of love.

“It’s definitely time for me to go,” Ino says, giving Sakura a sly look. She blanches at her phone when she sees the time. Hand on her hip, she raises her chin and opens her mouth, but it’s not necessary as the man holding her coat reappears out of the ether, silently summoned or simply quite good at what he does. 

“I’m going to be late, ugh.” 

“It’ll be fine; your style makes up for it. Fashionable, you know,” Sakura teases. As Sasuke leaves her side, fractures their embrace, there’s an odd, lonely pang trembling underneath her ribcage. 

“We should head out as well,” he says. Collecting her coat from the solemn porter whom diligently held it, Sasuke follows Sakura and Ino through the lobby and out the doors; they’re gabbling as birds, poking at one another and teasing yet somehow deep in discussion in half-formed fragments and finishing one another’s sentences, halves of the same whole. 

“Do I just—?”

Ino leans from the curb, arm hovering tentatively amidst chaotic night noise. Peering, as if a car will jump out previously unseen.

“Like you mean it,” Sakura tells her. “Be as demanding as you usually are.”

Ino narrows her eyes, but her redoubled efforts pluck a cab sleekly from the torpid lines of traffic and earns her smile as it coasts to the curb. Folding her arms, her shoulders dance in self-satisfaction at her victory. 

“I do quite like it here,” she says, grinning. Bestowing a princess wave upon them, a departing royal, she leaves them with a last lascivious and smug expression that could be for either one of them.

“Where’s she going, dressed up that way?”

Sakura smiles at him, a mischievous curl of the lips that threaten to numb out Sasuke’s hands and soul all over again. 

“Found a date. She wastes no time getting to know things — a person, a city. Honestly, it’s something I envy about her.”

“And me?” he asks, even as his mind tells him to backpedal, “Am I, is this, new for you?”

Lips freezing in place on her beautiful face, etched edges and ice. It seems that it lingers on the chilled, soft contours, everything she doesn’t say.

“Maybe.” A response with the cut of glass. “But I think it is for you too, whatever _this_ is, so unless you want to lay out all our cards, right now.” It’s an abrupt end that she doesn’t allow to trail off, no space for implication. Her lines, her ultimatums, they’re clear: Bare it all, or stick to the dance.

“Not tonight, then,” Sasuke murmurs, taking her chin in his fingers. She startles at his proximity and touch, makes a little noise as he kisses her, unusually bold — deep, always a little greedy, forever with an ache.

_You could always have this. You could keep him._

Knowing she couldn’t, that she would devour him body and soul, that he would try to follow, never the hero, always the shadow. 

They hover close, in silent occupation of quiet space amid the city’s evening hum; buzzing lights, the pitch and roll of bodies and speech, unceasing. 

“Ino, though,” she resumes, “she makes things hers, and easily. She’s good at that.” She pauses, letting the words breathe. “I think you do too, when you finally decide you want to.”

Sakura tries to take back her coat; he seems almost offended. She tugs on it again, pouting. 

“Chivalrous — but you’re also kind of rude.”

“I’ve never heard that before.” His tone implies he has, in fact, heard it before. 

“Well, you’re polite to me, at least. Concerned about my well-being. Always on the edge of wanting to defend my honor, or something. But — humor me, did your family want you to marry a good, socially acceptable girl? One who listens, demure? Or do you like to chase?”

Her smile curls into something on the edge of insolent. Teasing.

Sasuke’s expression rests somewhere between indignant and amused. “Good thing we’re not that close. Can’t have much of an opinion about it.”

“Oh gods, you explained about your brother and parents, I’m — I’m so sorry,” she groans. Covers her eyes with her hand. “How awful.”

Perhaps to cover her embarrassment, she slides her arm into his and starts down the sidewalk. So close like this, they sense the fledgling anxiety of one another: Clamminess and gooseflesh and orbital energy as they rotate in delicate perigee, the only law of physics present tonight a fragile gravity.

She sighs into his shoulder on the pretense of balance.

“Are you sure you want to walk in those?” Flickers his eyes at her heels, then looks down at the crown of her pink head.

“I’m perfectly capable,” she says. Tilting her head up to him, expression drawn in moue. 

It’s a beat or two before more of his words escape, spilling over the dam as before, questions unasked. “I have a large extended family. We don’t all get along. We don’t speak much anymore, now. When I was young, I always had a sense of duty to something larger than me, something we were bound in. It’s . . . hard to explain.”

“It sounds religious. Hierarchical.” There’s something tart in the words, a sour tinge. 

“It’s difficult,” he concedes, “and we’re not known to be friendly or welcoming to outsiders. It’s not all of us, though. My brother, he—”

Air catches. Sasuke swallows the last of his saliva into a throat desolate and bone-dry. _Why bring him up?_

“— he hated it. The tradition. The expectations.”

A shiver licks her spine; she feels exposed by a sense of premonition. Sagacity, brushing against danger. She clutches his arm tighter, and their footfalls move toward an unheard paean steeped in dread. 

“Sounds like a cult. A clan. Tightly-wound ideologically . . . ” Sakura trails off, eyes adrift. Then, she picks up the thread again, resuming: “I’m sorry. I’m ashamed to say I find it so interesting. My mother was very traditional and often weirdly superstitious. It sounds like two sides of the same coin. If both weren’t so afraid of the other, they all could have been friends.” 

Sasuke can’t see her wry, hurt smile, but he knows. The gentle barb, glossing over the prick and bleed of failed expectations. They both know what differences lie between, the icy tundra struggling to support its own weight, crumbling instead into inchoate drift. 

Coming to the steps of the magnificent venue, Sakura raises her eyes to its imposing affluence and glitter. Drawing back, unconsciously, withdrawing in the vein of an animal with pinned ears succumbing to the biological imperative to bolt. People littered carelessly on the steps, disseminated as prop pieces but ultimately perfectly-formed humans — the easy way they occupy space, essences toiled on by divine gods, modeled in gold and glittering in soft light.

As her heel hits the first step, the buzzing in her head begins. Knees wobbling. Throat tightening, the globular knot settling for her to swallow over, and over.

“Sakura,” he begins, “you’ve been nervous about this. I don’t blame you.”

Their feet move in tandem as they take each stair. 

“But you’re stronger than you think you are.”

And there are eyes on her, she knows now, on _them_ , and if he didn’t have her arm surely her legs wouldn’t support her.

“People will try to talk to you, figure you out. Especially once they know you’ve brought me along.”

“Just who are you?” It’s a flutter of an ask, and she’s not even sure it left her lips.

Sakura catches the eyes of a stranger, refusing to look away. They drop theirs first. Arm still in hers, Sasuke leans closer to say,

“You first.” 

This event seems frivolous now — the dark alley would be sufficient for them to unwind one another, just anonymous enough and scattered with the dregs of the passing secrets of strangers. The craving and repelling of danger, the apocalyptic rocking of a boat not built for terror.

“Name?”

She startles as she takes in the mass of the security guard, blinks up at him. Her mind sketches the radio in his ear, the device in his hands; commits it to memory, files the details away even in her frozen stupor.

“S-Sakura?” she says.

A flat, irritated gaze signals it wasn’t the correct answer. “Your full name, miss? Are you where you’re supposed to be?”

For a moment, she falters and wilts, yearns to flee as a classic Cinderella, leaving the fancy shoes behind and forfeiting the evening, returning to drab obscurity. But hasn’t she come far enough from that? Swallowing hard, with the grip of Sasuke’s muscular arm in hers, she watches the way his chin lifts against others who dare to ask questions, contest his authority — she realizes _this_ is where he’s from, this world, these circles. To him, the whispers and stares and formalities are not new aspects of his life but routine annoyances. And the thickness of his shell makes sense to her now, dislodges a million and one thoughts from her unconscious and sends them on the float. 

But there’s no time for unpacking it, not with the whispers at her back and security about to declare her a headcase. 

She lifts her own chin and turns her sparkling green eyes on security.

A smirk plays on Sasuke’s lips.

“Pardon, sir,” she says, low and slow — the decanting of wine in a glass. “I’ve been invited as a guest of Neji Hyuuga himself and while I do know he’s an _incredibly_ busy man,” and she leans into the words, lulling, soft and pliant, “it seems his office erred in providing me details. Could you possibly—?” 

Now bashfully gruff, the guard (though in circles like these, they function also as esteemed social secretaries, keepers of keys and secrets) runs his finger down a list. Tapping a name, he holds up that finger in pause. “Let me just check, you understand.”

“Oh please, do.” Gives him a delicate smile. 

Mutterings, whispers twist around them, moving from ears to lips and back again. With Sasuke at her side, tall and firm and with that useful edge of inviolable arrogance, it’s almost easy. She can sense it a little, his anxiety; this is not his most natural state any more than hers. 

When Sasuke turns his glittering eyes on hers it’s searing, peels back a layer of skin: the intensity of his interest. He’s willing — no, eager, if he’s ever been such for anything — to dive in and drown in her, tonight and every night to follow. 

“Yes, she says you invited her personally—”

As security has a stumbling conversation with his earpiece, Sasuke’s voice comes to her in a tenebrous tone, at once an echo of voices she’s heard but somehow a deviant half-step from the major key. 

“People will want to speak with you and I, and not always together. You will be something exotic for them, and I come with baggage.”

“Pink?” The guard glances at her. “Ah, yeah, it is.”

“Remember Sakura, this is strategy. These are not friends.”

“Sir, I — I didn’t know.” Sakura’s eyes flicker back to the guard as he stammers; she feels guilty that he’s being reprimanded. Sasuke’s eyes draw her back, commanding her to look only at him.

His stupid smirk.

“I suppose you’ll use your interesting brand of charm. You’re certainly smart enough.”

“Yes, I’ll let them up right away. Indeed, she has a guest.”

“Sasuke—”

“After all,” he says quietly, “you’ve already done it to me.”

And they’re escorted in the manner of debuting royalty, waving off security’s apologies and drawing the attention of those milling in the lobby, sailing to the elevator drunk on the giddy façade of clout. 

“Dresses should have pockets,” Sakura sighs, waving her clutch. “These are just impractical.” 

“We can always have them made for you.” He glares again at the third passenger in the elevator, a stoic redhead sporting a red birthmark above one pale eye. The stranger’s expression holds mild curiosity at best, but Sasuke watches him watch her.

“Didn’t I say no more gifts?” Sakura’s weight settles into one hip and thigh, brilliantly curved in her bright red dress. “I should have left this in my coat. I like my hands free.”

A soft _ding!_ interrupts the even softer music floating through tinny, gilded elevator speakers. The doors open, and both men nod her over the threshold. 

Sakura twinkles at the pale redhead on her way out, prompting a narrowing of the eyes from him and a grunt of annoyance from Sasuke. 

Down another sweeping hallway, carpet plush. Glitter and shine from every angle, catching the light of chandeliers. Sakura’s wide eyes try to take in all sights, sounds, and snatches of conversation. Still, she feels eyes and can’t help feeling the whispers are pointed, deliberate; Sasuke continues along, unruffled sans the stern set of his jaw. 

She’s discomfited when they pass over the threshold, the grandiose double doors open to let people move as they wish: Small circles of conversation reforming and collapsing as microorganisms in constant changing shape, well-dressed garcons weaving among them in silent service. Sakura spies the glass doors indicating balconies, hears pitched peals of laughter dancing to the impossibly high and coffered ceiling; but it’s in the way they carry themselves, fitting into the space which offers them loving deference. 

And she feels exposed, bare, an erroneous glitch. 

“Miss Sakura?”

When she realizes the man on her arm is not Sasuke anymore, _oh no,_ but rather the same man that invited her in the first place, she arranges her face into what she hopes passes as an excited smile.

“Oh, Mr. Hyuuga—”

“Please, Neji,” he says, leading her to fuck knows where and she tries not to look angry at the fact that her dumb date already ditched her to do fuck knows what. “No need for the formalities.”

“Ah, really?” She lifts her clutch to the surroundings, indicating the room.

A chuckle, a note of arrogance. The twinge in her stomach and dryness of mouth confirms her naive compulsions for a certain type of man. Entangling with the same sort, always. She relaxes minutely, hates him a little less. Just a little.

“You’re witty,” he says, still directing a gentle glide across the floor, nodding at people as he goes. “In an odd way.”

It feels like a polite way of saying quaint, provincial, or something less than genuine politeness. Finally they stop moving, and it seems as though they’re in the very center of the floor. Like magic, magnetism, a silent and sleek waiter materializes with a tray, handing a drink to Neji. 

“What would you like?” 

They’re both watching her, and she stumbles over words. 

“Ah, I’m really — whatever is — I don’t—”

“Simply tell him,” Neji says, waving a hand, already bored. 

“Gimlet,” she says firmly, recovering. “Please.”

The unknown server disappears. Sakura finds herself staring at Neji’s brunette locks, thinking he could give Ino a run for her money on shiny, soft hair. 

“Didn’t you have a companion, I heard?”

“I did.” Her tone rings tart. “He seems to have disappeared already.”

“Pity,” Neji says, in a voice indicating otherwise. “But our conversation at the station, I’m still interested in the end of that. You poor thing, so busy working in the middle of the night.”

(In fact she had begged her call screener, Yamato, to make up any excuse to extricate her from the conversation.)

“Well, I suppose it’s my job, to bring entertainment and a friendly voice to those listening. I enjoy it, anyway. People’s lives are interesting, and there’s a vulnerability to it that you can’t discover during a daytime conversation.” 

“And what did you say you used to do?”

She wishes desperately for a drink in hand for the luxury of a pause. “I used to — well, I wanted to be a doctor. But life doesn’t always work out how you want.”

The expression on his face is genuine confusion, as if not getting what one wants is an impossibility beyond comprehension. 

“Your eyes tell me that’s what you want. So why aren’t you doing that?”

The waiter returns with a cold glass, and she considers kissing him for his timely arrival. “Thank you.”

Again, the furrow of Neji’s brows at her kindness to nobodies. He’s about to speak when an arm snakes through his, brushes the lapels of his jacket; wide eyes and two brunette buns hover above his shoulder. 

“Who’s this?” 

“There you are,” he says, sounding cross. Though, that could be his usual disposition. “Are you showing off for people again?”

“It’s good for parties,” she says, grinning. “Don’t be so stuffy.”

“You’re not a street performer.” Now his attractive face seems sour, but it doesn’t bother the newcomer. Instead she pokes him in the ribs. With the same finger, she points at Sakura. “Who’s this?”

“Sakura,” she supplies, making a motion to shake hands. Realizes one hand has a drink and the other a _stupid_ clutch, and she’s loath to relinquish either. 

“Sakura who?”

“I told you, the young woman who works the overnights for the station.”

“Which station? You own like, several.”

“I fear you don’t listen to much of what I say, Tenten.”

“Maybe you’re boring,” she snarks. Leaves his side to walk in a strange, slow circle around Sakura, sizing up a wild animal on the dusty plains as prey. 

Several feet away, Sasuke’s shouldering his way through pockets of people, scattering them in flocks as a tall brunette woman follows, hot on his heels.

“Aren’t I a little out of your age range, Mei?” 

“You’re firmly in it, handsome.”

“I’d call that cradle-robbing.” 

“Ouch, I’m wounded.”

Now she takes his upper arm, more like a stern mother than a girlfriend. “But what are you doing here? No one has seen you for a long time.”

Shaking her off with his arrogant frown, he scoffs. “Everyone’s so concerned, huh? You just want gossip. Our families aren’t even close — why do you care?”

“Sue me, I’m nosy. Also curious as to why two of the most marriageable, handsome brothers drop off the radar, and how a boy disappears so suddenly.”

“So I am too young for you. As for the rest,” he hisses, “it’s probably the dead family thing.”

Mei falters, observing the angry bright red of his neck as he stalks away. A flash of color snags her gaze; he’s in temperamental pursuit of a girl with _pink hair?_ held hostage by Hyuuga Neji and trapped under the gaze of his pseudo-girlfriend. 

A smile kicks up the corner of her lips.

“So you know how to fight, and you’re a DJ-therapist? She’s way better than your other stuffy friends,” Tenten admonishes. Neji looks sour, as if she’s stolen his thunder. She continues hovering around Sakura as if watching a rack of meat, slowly rotating under hot lights. “You’re pretty, too.” 

“She’s an employee. Though yes, she’s already met my cousin under interesting circumstances.” Sips his drink as Tenten continues to pluck at Sakura’s dress unbidden, lacking boundaries. 

“Oh, is she here?” Sakura perks up, sashaying in what she hopes is a surreptitious manner out of Tenten’s reach. “Hinata?”

“Yes, somewhere,” he sniffs. “She’s always hiding at these things. I don’t think she enjoys them, except it’s her job to.”

Sakura suppresses a scowl with a twist of the lips instead; the scathing tone isn’t endearing.

“Is your hair real?”

Sakura’s about to answer when Tenten’s face changes, mouth forming an unabashed, round O. Neji’s contorts into a strange look of surprise, then glides into bristling arrogance. 

Sakura feels him behind her: The trail of his fingers just above the curve of her ass, skirting the close edge of gallantry as they settle into the small valley of her back. Heat, the touch of him releasing pent-up pressure from beneath the skin. 

Looking at him over her shoulder, she deliberately looks him up and down with glittering eyes, sharp with hunger and anger.

“You disappeared.” 

“Someone caught up with me.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.” Neji’s words pull the attention of all three of them, especially with the unexpected mean streak underneath. “Well, well, you’ve crawled out of wherever you’ve been hiding. What brings you here with the rest of us mere mortals?”

Sakura feels a crackle in the air, a tension. Tenten’s eyes are darting between her and Sasuke, processing.

“I’m sure you don’t care about anything I’ve been doing.” Sasuke’s thumb presses flat against her spine. It’s shaking. “You seem the same as ever.”

“You’re her date, are you?” Neji laughs, but it’s mocking. “That’s interesting indeed. Tell me, how is your brother?”

Before she can stop herself, Sakura cuts across Sasuke’s retort. “That’s not appropriate, is it?”

Green eyes bore into pale ones. She lifts her chin like it will make her taller, channeling an undercurrent of anger on Sasuke’s behalf. 

“Excuse me,” he says, frowning. It’s difficult for him to say, and it’s certainly not an apology. “You’re right, miss. It wasn’t.” 

Now Hinata appears at Neji’s other elbow, opposite Tenten, in a sweeping floor-length periwinkle number and matching clutch, red in the face.

“N-Neji, hello. I’m sorry, I’ve been — oh!” She takes in Sakura and Sasuke, blinking rapidly as if warding off the bright sun. “It’s nice to see you both again.”

“He said you were here!” Sakura tucks the clutch under her drink arm and reaches across the stunned circle to summon her; as with everything in her orbit, she’s lured easily like a spell, and Hinata finds herself at Sakura’s side. 

“Ah yes, you’re already familiar,” Neji says. To Sasuke: “Were you there when that . . . incident happened?” Rings with a note of distaste, and Hinata casts her eyes to the floor. Sakura feels another ripple of irritation.

“No.” Sasuke’s curtness is brusque, a slap to the mouth. “Sakura said she handled it, and called me after.”

“I have something to ask you, Hinata. I’m borrowing her,” Sakura says to them, taking her by the arm and gliding away with the same affected, snobby air she’s been subjected to all evening. The hint of mockery at the edges doesn’t go unnoticed, but Tenten waves a hand and turns to go, perhaps to seek more amusing antics, and Neji glowers under Sasuke’s dark, glittering gaze. 

Sasuke and Neji, now left alone and awkward, each take a sip respectively of drinks masquerading as excuses for silence. 

“She’s smart,” Neji says, plain and blunt. “Pleasing to the eye.” 

Sasuke’s raise of the eyebrows functions, apparently, as enough of a response.

“So either the rumors aren’t quite true, or she’s as crazy as you.”

“I don’t give time to gossip,” Sasuke says, rattling the ice in his glass. “And neither should you, well-known as you are.”

Neji snorts, a droll smile surfacing. “Uchihas. Hm. The yardstick for comparison, and the rest of us can’t figure out if we hate you or envy you. It’s likely both.” Draining the rest, he leaves it on a passing tray with a careless flourish. “What doesn’t differ between us and the average person, though, is that we all like to watch the unraveling of the rich and famous — even amongst ourselves. It’s akin to bloodsport.”

“If only I’d get to see that of your family,” Sasuke mutters. Slipping fingers under his tie and collar, frowning at the prickling heat and yanking it away from his neck, he pivots to see Sakura and Hinata standing close and in deep conversation. Perhaps feeling his eyes, the former wiggles the tips of her fingers, half-smile dripping like honey on striking, ochre lips.

He knows Neji’s gaze is following his line of sight.

“What a problem to have, Uchiha.”

“Is he always an ass, or just especially to you?” Sakura asks, holding onto Hinata’s elbow. She keeps her smile in place, feeling their eyes.

“He isn’t — he doesn’t mean to—”

“He is, and he does. Just like he finds me a curiosity — my employment is irrelevant.” 

Hinata flushes, tucking a dark strand of hair behind her ear. With a shy smile, she responds, “He was curious about your upbringing, with the fighting and all. We keep a traditional martial art in the family, you know. Though I’m not very good.”

Sakura regards her a moment, then upon realizing she’s serious, collapses into giggles. “He’ll be disappointed by my pedigree, or lack thereof. All I did was fight with neighborhood kids!”

Hinata hides her laugh behind her hand. The humor fades off for both of them. In the intervening pause, Sakura inhales deeply and lets it out in measured beats. 

“So, I was hoping to see you here because I have a request.”

“From me?” 

“Yeah. I figured that you’re someone I can ask and . . . someone I can trust.”

Sakura’s jade eyes flicker to the men and back to her again. 

Hinata nods her head. “I’m guessing you don’t want me to ask my cousin, though?”

“Right. That’s the idea.”

There’s a long pause, and Hinata shifts imperceptibly, blocking their view of both their faces. Playing with the clasp of her clutch, she asks, “What are you looking for, Sakura?”

“I’ll be blunt,” she says, depositing her empty glass on a roving tray, “I need info. I’m no princess or even a college graduate. I need help finding out about his history — Sasuke’s. Because the truth is, it’s a secret club, and the information is under social lock and key.” She pauses, brushes fingers across painted lips in thought. “For people like me, it’s not on our radar; we’re blissfully unaware, living our average lives. For your circle . . . it’s just an open secret no one looks too closely at.”

When Hinata goes rigid, holding the same breath for just a bit too long, she knows she’s hit the mark. 

“So you’ve heard things?”

The sound of fingernails, tip-tapping on the metal clasp in a stilted rhythm.

“Ah, well, respectfully, our families maintain relationships for many reasons, and even the loosest bonds are still useful in some way. Though,” Hinata hastens to add, kindly, “that does not make most of us ‘friends’ in a traditional sense.”

Another pause stretches between them, delicate, before Sakura resumes. “I need to know what nobody wants to say. But I want real proof; not what gossip columns print. I want the truth.”

Still running her nail over the metal, forcing a reedy scraping sound, Hinata closes her eyes against the prospect of such a thing, like it’s against her own sensibilities. Biting her lip, she raises her pale eyes to Sakura’s.

Weight settling into her hip again, the camber of her hip prominent in the rich red dress. A glimmer in her green eyes transforms her face into an alien, uncanny valley. Unearthly.

“Hinata, I want this. I think . . . I want him.”

Why she’s spilling things written on her heart to near-strangers, she doesn’t know. Stupid. A waiter sweeps into their orbit and Hinata startles, stammering out a request for champagne; when Sakura mentions a gimlet, the bland waiter nods knowingly, as if he’s been the fulfiller of all her requests this evening and simply continues his role in the universe. Perhaps it is the same one, and she hasn’t noticed. 

Close to them, too close, stands a tall woman with sandy-blonde hair, wearing a mulberry-shaded dress. She takes the proffered drink previously ordered from the same waiter with a curt nod and a strong, painted lip, and she’s struggling not to roll her eyes at them.

“If you’re trying to have a private conversation,” she drawls, “there’s rooms all over this place for that. Hell, there’s balconies.” 

As she takes a long draught in the face of their apprehensive expressions, her eyes take a full circular trek of disbelief. 

“Why don’t you just go grab him? He’s _your_ date, isn’t he? Plus, he couldn’t stop looking at you.”

Pivoting, Sakura scans the floor but doesn’t see either of the men they’d left behind. She curses under her breath.

The woman chokes on her drink, trying not to laugh. “Someone dragged them away a bit ago. You’re only palling around with two of the most eligible, handsome young, whatever-the-fuck headlines write about them nowdays.” Wincing, she shakes her head. “Sorry for the language. I’m bad at being a public oil princess. Temari’s the name.”

Sakura moves to shake hands again, groans, then lets her clutch hand fall helplessly to her side. 

“These are stupid,” Temari says, waving hers. “I’m about to dump it in a garbage can, if I could find one. When your hands aren’t free, people lead you by the elbows.”

Sakura finds herself grinning at the statement, tipsy and buzzing with heat. Hinata’s eyes stay on the ground, but the struggle not to smile says it all.

“I’m Sakura.”

“My brother saw you in the elevator. You’re here with Uchiha Sasuke.” Temari takes another long swig, eyeing her with unabashed interest. “Again, sorry. I’m too forward for my own good. Stunning dress, by the way. You’ll lead even a man like him straight off a balcony — if you can find him again.” She waves a hand toward the mess, the vacillating biological tango of social interaction. 

“At least you’re honest,” Sakura says. To Hinata, she asks in an undertone, “Do you have a pen? I need you to write this down.”

She dictates quietly, though not in such a careful or furtive tone that Temari couldn’t possibly hear most of it. Tucking a paper scrap away, Hinata snaps her periwinkle clutch shut and nods, saying she’ll get back to her.

“What’s with the secrecy?” With a snort, Temari drains the rest of her drink. “Not used to dating in these circles, huh?”

Sakura pauses, debating on how much to reveal; Hinata stays silent. Temari waves again, a broom to dust away the words she keeps spilling. 

“You’re a common girl, aren’t you? Ack — that’s not the best way to put it. Just know,” Temari says, and now she’s closed the gap between them with a grin, “you’re more fun to hang around. I always think, ‘Are we that hard to be around, people like us?’ Probably, huh?”

An exchange of glass once more: Temari’s empty for a refresh, a champagne, and a gimlet. Sakura tries to focus on him and see if it’s the same man who's been steadily supplying her all night, but he fades into the background.

Starting in on her new one, Temari says unprompted, “I’m not usually this fun. Couldn’t bring my boyf— whatever I call him, anyway. Not sure if we’re there yet. He’d really hate this whole atmosphere.” With a wry expression, she indicates the entirety of the room as a princess illustrates her many subjects. As surely as Sakura knows she’s an aberration, there’s a kindred emotion in knowing perhaps someone else might feel the same. 

All three stand in silence under chandelier light, shifting nervous weight from one heel to the other; it hurts the eyes, feigning warmth and casting a garish pallor. They sip the only available thing to soothe, drinking from what is perhaps the only well of courage.

Sakura frowns into her gimlet, gulps down the rest, and holds the empty glass out for the inevitable, expected man who slips into her space to accommodate. Thumbing away a drop from the corner of her lips, she isn’t sure who she’s speaking to when she says, “Right, I’m going to find my date.” 

She heads into the mess, chin high and eyes bright. Temari raises her glass in solidarity, and Hinata ruminates.

Sakura emerges from the throng with three business cards, two more drinks poisoning her blood, and one memorably disgusting, unasked-for kiss on the hand. Cheeks lit up like festival lanterns and still unable to find Sasuke, she stalks down a dim, carpeted hallway in pursuit of a restroom; the plushness mutes the angry stomps she was hoping to soothe herself with. 

Heavy and ornate doors flank her left and right — dark wood. The constant low murmur of voices, gossip and drunkenness and thinly-veiled acrimony for fellow social echelons all roiling in one discomforting atmosphere. Pursing her lips at all she’s witnessed, she can see why her date decided to vanish but still doesn’t forgive him. He did warn her: This would be difficult. And if this is the life he was steeped in before, a person who rarely had time to oneself, it explains some suspicions but surfaces myriad more. 

The first door reveals a dim scene, a heavy haze, bodies draped over furniture as melting wax. The smell is familiar, pricks the inside of her nose, and she’s a little put out that no one told her about the parties within parties. Scattered paraphernalia. Two men with grey hair participate in a languid disagreement, heads lolling and wrists limp as they take up space like fleshy puddles, spread in a sordid relationship with the couch. The larger man, with fleeting pockmarks on his face wrought by age and broad shoulders, waves a lazy finger at the other; Sakura wonders why the other man’s wearing a mask and wonders if he’s considered strange, even for these circles. 

“But haven’t you ever considered the environment failing us before we destroy it? Them coming after us — the frogs? Nature taking it all back. It’d be poetic justice.”

“If it’ll come anyway,” the masked man says delicately, “then it does no good to worry.” 

They notice her at the same time, struggling to focus on her as she hovers over the threshold. 

“Good gods,” the first man groans. “They get younger and younger.” 

His companion shakes his head, raises his shoulders in weak apology. 

“Sorry, wrong room. Feel free to resume . . . whatever you were doing,” Sakura says.

“You don’t partake?”

“In?”

With large hands, he indicates everything within his grasp. She can’t quite tell if he’s referencing the drugs or his lap. An angry vein pops in her temple; she’s apt to make a scene.

“A little out of my age range,” Sakura says, wrinkling her nose. Tilting her head at his companion, she considers a moment. “You, maybe not.” 

“He’s an idiot,” the latter says, waving her away. “He’s sloppy and won’t remember tomorrow.”

Nodding, grateful for the dismissal, she wiggles her fingers in an awkward wave and shuts the door. 

Another moan, this time of wanton debasement.

“Don’t bother with the dramatics; I heard she came here with Uchiha Sasuke.”

The old pervert opens one eye, grins. “Oh-ho! Now that’s interesting.”

Pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes, Sakura lets out a loose litany of curses; they come easy after a few drinks.

“This time,” she says grimly to herself, “knock on the door.”

The second door reveals large-shouldered men of all origins and species crowding around a table too small for them, the exact nature of their endeavors hidden. Knocking hadn’t yielded a response, so Sakura opened the door anyway to several expressions ranging from rugged to bewildered. 

Glancing at the weapons stacked against the wall, _what **is** that? _she withdraws without a single word, curious about their cloak colors but not enough to be introduced to the odd melee of what have to be illegal armaments. 

Now holding her head in the hallway, she stamps her feet. Unreal, the lengths she has to go to find a simple toilet; meanwhile, everyone’s elbow-deep in illegal everything. This sure isn’t a work event — it’s a goddamn underground black market meeting of the minds. 

She skips a few doors, tries her luck with an unobtrusive knock. Accidentally meeting a pair of glazed, unfocused eyes, the drip and dank of the room confirms it instantly. This is just two people getting some, and it’s the least offensive thing she’s seen in this hallway. 

With a surreptitious thumbs up, she shuts this door too. 

Gloriously, she locates relief at the end of another hallway and holds her spinning head in her hands as she contemplates her next move. Under the fluorescence, she muses on why lights in toilet rooms are so awful and sifts through the night so far. She needs to locate her date, who everyone seems to want a piece of, and while she’s gathered some useful information, her minimum requirement was to show up and she’s done just that, satisfied her boss. 

So what’s she doing here, really?

With layers of trepidation and denial stripped away in the sting of inbrient, Sakura considers what she wants.

Only when she’s found her way back to the main floor does it strike her — she knows where to find Sasuke.

The only thing worse than yanking back a heavy curtain to reveal him standing on the balcony is the expectant, tipsy way he regards her, as if he’s been waiting all night and she’s been lost off the forest path out of her own ignorance. 

“You fucking jerk!” she hisses. He blinks, bemused. 

Skin already searing, and the way his smoldering eyes follow the long, long length of her legs makes her want to punch him in his pretty mouth. 

“I’ve been looking for you _everywhere_ — do you know the people I’ve put up with, do you know how many _fucking—”_ and here she jerks open her stupid small purse, waving it at him, “— cards and numbers I don’t want?” Tossing it on the balcony floor, she advances on him; his underreaction makes her want to tear out his throat, but his stupid, careless grace and the way he leans against the balustrade, so arrogant, spurs an unforgiving heat in her body, low and simmering. “Do you know the things I’ve seen?” 

He frowns. “Ah, should’ve warned you about that. I just . . . assumed you would understand that business would be done here.”

Her laugh comes out chaotic, pitchy. “No, Sasuke, I’m not like you! I didn’t grow up like this. I was too busy getting in trouble and trying to be a doctor and figure out my life, but wow did I screw that up, because I’m an idiot.”

He comes forward, and she folds her arms as it will pause his advance. It doesn’t.

“And I’m still being an idiot, because I’m here coming after you.”

And they’re kissing again, less gentle than before as he takes her by the hair and there and always, the ever-present ache in his tongue and lips as if he can extract her essence, drink the dregs. It occurs to her _there are rooms everywhere here_ — 

“You’re annoying,” he says against her lips, the ones still red and pristine. “But not an idiot.”

His hand comes forward, tucking loose hair behind her ear. He continues. 

“I said this would be difficult. My family’s history, my life, to people here, is half-truth, half-fiction. None of it’s their business, but you bringing me here, being with me . . . people want to know who you are too. But as I said, this is strategy. Use their interest to your advantage; what do you want, Sakura? To be a doctor, a wife? Power, or prestige? What doors,” and his voice is in her ear, electricity dancing down her spine, “do you want to open?”

 _Use them,_ he’s saying, _use me._

Placing a hand over his, the one holding her face, she feathers him apart with her gaze.

“Where have you been?” 

“Finding information.”

She contemplates this, then glares. “The man in the lounge.” Without waiting for confirmation, she growls and takes him by his shirt, fingers fisted in the expensive material. “I didn’t ask you to do that.”

He doesn’t confirm.

Releasing him, she hastily gathers the contents of her clutch, snaps it shut and straightens up again. 

“I want to make a good impression. Let’s see if these people can make good on their lofty promises. I want to dazzle them, pull the strings of their influence.” She smiles, readjusting her dress here and there, smoothing it over the maddening, beautiful muscle of her thigh. 

Sasuke’s eyes follow, and his growl is an animal’s, starved and wild. “You’re great like this.” 

They come together again, heads bowed toward one another. Smoothing his tie, she inhales his heady scent and whispers unheard nothings and plans against the apple of his throat, and he considers not for the first time that his life may be blissfully out of his control. 

And she’s _on_. Electric. He’s the adornment on her arm as she glides through groups and conversations balletic and charming, with a refinement that makes him wonder how she’s ever needed defending. She learns fast: Deflects hard questions, rebukes character quips of her date with witchery, and summons gimlets from the ether.

Powerful men peddle wisdom, equal parts useless and magnanimous. One says, “You can have the world if you want,” confiding secrets, “with a face like that and a man like him.” 

Beaming, she presses her nose against Sasuke’s cheek and laughs with just the right lilt of modesty. 

Sasuke’s unusually rigid, because it’s taking every ounce of control not to throw her in one of those orgiastic rooms himself and love her on every available furniture and surface. Their dance of dominance is constant, and she’s winning again. Each meeting of the eyes is a sordid communiqué, and they’ve managed to create that bewitching personal space to ward off wandering hands; it could be the way his arm never leaves the small dip of her back, silent, vile messages tapping her bones in morse code. Her fingers run the rim of her glass and find their way to her own bright lips, dripping liquid, secrets. 

“Of course we’ll be in touch,” Sakura promises, easing her hand from another stranger’s. Sasuke steers her away with his fingers still splayed wide across the skin of her back. 

Nudging her temple with his nose, he says through gritted teeth, “I don’t like him.”

“Oh, do you like anyone?”

“He’s touchy.”

“That must be awful for you.” 

His fingers drag, lazy and indulgent, following the inlet meandering into the curve of her backside. She hums quietly to disguise what he can’t see — the inadvertent swallow when her mouth runs dry, as if the loving tension and heat between her thighs drains her of every other liquid drop. 

But he knows, he knows. They can’t be in one another’s space without generating heat, always on the razor’s edge of ignition. And with it all winding down, their presence accepted and less shiny for the hecklers, slipping away like transients sounds nothing less than divine. 

There’s standing room along the edge of the floor, not so far from an unmarked door. She steers him, weaving him away from the noise. 

Lingering near the stairwell exit, they face one another with heads close, enjoying one another’s company, tender for the benefit of nosy guests. Sakura takes him by the tie, runs her fingers the length of it, channeling that glamorous and dangerous midnight voice he’s touched himself to so many times over. Beyond the edge of the fabric her hand continues, skirts the buckle of his belt— 

“What’s etiquette, here, _sir_? Should I bid Neji Hyuuga a good night?”

“Fuck him.” The harsh, rich consonants prompt gooseflesh; with his hands on her like this, her arousal is twine poised to snap. 

Leaning against the stairwell door, she seems to tumble through, waiting for him to follow. 

Sasuke chases her down a few flights before catching up — the clatter of her clutch hitting the floor reverberates loud in the tomb-like space, though not enough to mask their sounds: The cry she pours into his throat when he crushes her against the dank, concrete wall, his soft cursing as she nips his bottom lip with desperate teeth. Panting, and all the breathless anger and taunting in between:

“Jealous, aren’t you?”

“I saw them staring.” His mouth scalds her, dropping off her lips and heading down the column of her ivory neck. His hand grasps her hip in warning, greedy, and he yanks her forward to press her against his cock. At her collarbone, furious and begrudging praise bursting en route. “You were good. They’re weak. Fucking _desperate._ ”

“And you?” Her long leg crooks around his hip, hitching the dress’s hem high on her thigh; the heat of her brings noises from him that shouldn’t be heard out loud. “What are you?”

He doesn’t say it, focuses on his other hand stealing up her dress with the intention of fulfilling stupid promises. A perfect and functional setting waits for them, for this purpose, but he’s given up logic when it comes to her and succumbs to all things base and senseless. He knows she takes men’s lust into stride, tuning them to the pitch she desires; she knows he hates it enough to love her out of her mind. 

_I’m yours;_ says it against her neck as his fingers dive between her legs with alarming precision, stealing a keening pitch from her that’s brand new. Skin tasting of liquor and confession.

Even with him pinning her this way he knows each touch is a question, a given gift, his possessiveness still subject to her gentle praise. 

“I want this off,” he growls, pulling his other thumb across her lips. Hard. 

Unusually, she’s bereft of words — it could be his busy fingers, composing, responsible for the carnal, sustained song in her throat. 

Her eyes are hypnotic; his, predatory. Sasuke stares at her for a moment, then drags that same thumb across her cheek to mark her in vibrant ochre.

Kissing her, crushing her flush against the stone:

“I want you to come.”

Voice on the edge of sinister, sound and quality black and fit to choke. He wouldn’t know it as his own, if asked later, but together, like this, they’re a strange love sewn with something like madness. 

Hissing over the whimper of his name — 

“I want you to take you apart.”

Sakura swallows hard, clawing at the edge of composure for the last word.

“T-try as much as you like.”

  
  


There are numerous witnesses: The sleepy young man whose unlucky shifts are overnights, falling asleep over the audit and college textbooks. A porter here and there, milling about for any oddly-timed arrivals in the approaching dawn. The late, or early hour in which the cleaning crew takes care of the floors, the tables, the gilt, the plants. 

They burst through the lobby, colorful and crackling with erratic energy. His shoes scuff the floor just mopped and her heeled feet swing at his sides as she clings to his back and points, urging him forward with unearthly laughter and a tug on the soft reins of his tie, loose silk around his hot neck. 

Pink hair drapes him in lieu of his missing jacket; she fists the front of his dress shirt with slender fingers, and a button pops off, disappearing. Lost in the lobby, a soft pattering fading to nothing. The crisp air and dusty neon light seem to come in with them, swirling in the cold morning. They attempt a sloppy crush of lips despite the angle, impatience that fails. 

No one approaches them, though the laws of hospitality say they should. Instead they glance at one another, watching the couple weave toward the elevator in a cloud of whispers, low and rich and laced with love and sin. 

A soft chime signals the doors have closed, that they’ve gone. It sounds weak, faint in comparison against the loud sound of a heavy, lowball glass hitting the polished wood of the bar.

A man stares at his own pale, shaking hands, chest burning, lips set in a thin, grim line.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Opener is "Strange Love" by Simple Creatures. They're all good songs, really, but I like this one in particular and find it fitting. Who actually is reading 8,000 words that I write? You're good people.
> 
> Rude!Neji is my favorite Neji tbh
> 
> I'd say I'll promise to make these chapters a little shorter but honestly I canNOT promise that


	9. IX

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This smile for him is flimsy, delicate. “Why trade one hazard for another?”
> 
> Something ominous appears in his face, then disappears swiftly as it came.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: vomiting

IX.

 _Get a map, draw a line that connects you and I  
_ _And follow it to the end, to  
_ _start all over again_

❦  
  
  


While comfortable breaking into Sasuke’s apartment on whimsy and boredom, Naruto’s not used to coming home to people in his own living room. It takes him several moments of languid blinking to remember that he’s given this woman a key, so seeing her sprawled out on his rug, snuffling slightly in the glow of the television, glittering and beautiful even in her mess of sleep, shouldn’t feel so strange.

Naruto’s head bobs dangerously close to the open V forming the front of her jumpsuit as he tries to determine just how asleep she is. 

Ino’s eyes open. “Do you have any food in here?”

Yelping, Naruto jumps back. “What?”

Rubbing her bright blue eyes with the heels of her hands, she pouts. “My date sucked, and I want to eat my feelings. Don’t tell anyone.”

“But don’t you have a hotel room?”

Ino seems to lose air, wilting as depressed and dehydrated flowers. “Look, I was in the neighborhood, and I thought, I don’t know . . .” 

She doesn’t finish, but the expression on her face gives him a sympathetic pang somewhere under the ribs. _I don’t feel like being alone._ He can certainly understand the feeling. Sasuke’s sour enough for him on the daily, and Ino’s too pretty to look quite so sad. 

“Whatever you want, I’ll get it. And whoever it was, he’s an idiot.” 

His comment makes her blossom, replenishing her wellspring of confidence: It might be one of the brightest things he’s ever seen.

“He _was_ an idiot. And super weird.”

So they camp on the floor of his sitting room with snacks from the nearby corner store; he pops the aluminum tabs of cans, she grips the bottle neck of the least-terrible wine carried on the shelf. Even with sleepy smudges under her eyes, she has the glow of sunshine and moonrock, sparkle innate to her chemical makeup. 

“A lunatic, really,” she says. A tartness lingers on her lips, from the wine, or maybe from the date. “It’s my fault for going after weird underground artists. What a joke. I know better!”

Naruto takes a swig of beer, flipping through boring twilight channels. “So what does he make? Does he paint stuff?”

“Get this.” Eyes rolling, she pours herself another glass as if the rest isn’t going to her anyway. “Performance art. I’m dead, Naruto. He really means he blows weird shit up in his garage.”

“Well, most people don’t have garages here. And I’m not saying you picked a bad one, but—”

She hits him with her shoulder and he chokes into the can. 

“Oh! But I did get the goods. You owe me.” With a sly smile (and his stomach seems to fall away, like missing a step on the stairs), she unlocks her phone, dancing a little in anticipation. Leaning close, heads touching at the temples — 

and Naruto swallows hard at the proximity, the scent of fruity wine on her lips, smoothing over the carbonated, astringent taste from his own — 

she brings up the photos from earlier in the evening, crowing. 

“Look at this, they’re so cute it’s nauseating,” she says, swiping through several. Naruto yields to tipsy laughter at the sight.

“He’s an idiot. So serious. Oh man, that’s the dress you put her in?” With a low whistle, he tips back the rest of his beer and finishes by crushing the can against his head. Ino elbows him. He retaliates in a mature manner by sticking out his tongue. “Can you send me these? The bastard will never.” 

“Sure,” she says, “but don’t send them too far. He was very weird about the whole thing. Come to think of it, Sakura doesn’t have a lot of photos, either.”

“Sounds like they’re made for each other, then. Gimme,” Naruto whines, flicking her hair. “I never get anything to make fun of him for, and this is perfect.”

Her thumb moves a mile a minute, the other holding her wine glass aloft. There's a perfect, preserved imprint from her mouth, vivid, a shade of peach. His eyes are drawn to it, but surely it’s only the beer making him contemplate the shape and curve of her lips.

“You don’t strike me as a guy who buys himself wine glasses. Who got you these?” Ino hits the send button with a triumphant click, signaled by the tap of her fingernail. 

Sinking to the floor, Naruto squints as he types, fingers moving with much less grace. Holding his phone above his face, he pauses to think.

“Huh. I don’t know. Gotta be a gift.” 

His phone slips and lands on his face; Ino throws her head back, dissolving into unabashed laughter at his expense.

The photos go from Ino’s phone to Naruto’s, who sends one to Shikamaru — 

_he’s got it bad. look at his dumb face lmao_

who’s still up unusually late, and ends up sending one to his not-girlfriend he was already talking to — 

_He’s sort of obsessed with her. It’s a real drag. He’s known this girl for a month, maybe ..._

who immediately shoots it to her siblings’ group chat, pausing in her research; on her large monitor, design software takes up the lion’s share of the screen while a search window floats in the corner showing her not-lover’s place of employment — 

_This is her, right? You saw them in the elevator? You won’t win that one; they’re so in love it’s gross_

And Temari receives a message back from Kankuro, who’s currently on a trip that robbed him the joy of attending— 

_Who the fuck are they??_

Then a second one, his subtle follow-up— 

_And go to SLEEP!_

She frowns and scoffs in the glow of her computer screen, muttering under her breath and then actually typing it, telling him where he can stick his suggestions. 

And so it goes on into the early morning, gossip passed as tokens on a spectrum of close friends to mere acquaintances.

Not that any of it matters, because a reporter covering the event already handed off his photos and observations to a close friend and gossip columnist as a favor, pleading thinly-veiled ignorance to trifle and trash. 

Nothing quite escapes a well-planted camera lens. 

And here he is again, coming back from the dead in a swirl of salt, skin, and the tang of her.

He inhales, forcing a fresh burst of oxygen into his lungs, which in turn causes a yawn. A hand goes to his temple which feels waterlogged, heavy. The other hovers in the air and then comes down on the nightstand, groping for the phone. He’d open his eyes, after all, but he’s not ready for the sharpness of full consciousness. 

Sasuke palms the entire phone and drags it onto the mattress next to him. Grumbling, the punching of keys. 

“Room service?”

“Good morning, Mr. Uchiha!”

Sasuke winces, clears his throat that feels full of glass. Peels his eyelids apart. Knowing his brusqueness doesn’t endear him, he manages to grunt out something about coffee and breakfast. 

“Of course.” Always smooth voices, and he’s never able to decipher if it's part of the job or it’s another unknown, unspoken deference. “I assume late checkout as well?”

A pale forearm snakes out from underneath a mess of pillows and sheets, the former seized en masse from him at some ungodly, gloaming hour. Tapping him, he looks to see one green eye amid a tangle of pink, and she wiggles her fingers at the phone. 

Sasuke coughs to clear his throat again, but it comes out wretched, crackling. “One second.”

He hands Sakura the phone, and she drags it into her makeshift cave of warmth. 

He should know, by now, her unwitting charm undoes him so easily; how only the throaty flutter of her voice, raspy and stupid with indulgent afterglow, can reduce his body’s reactions to those shamelessly base. 

“Good morning. Ah, yes, we did, thank you.”

Sasuke closes his eyes; he’s not quite a praying man, but getting hard while the girl next to him chats with room service makes him wonder again if he’s dreaming, or in the longest coma. Because he’s damn sure she was just asked how they slept. 

“Do you have anything sweet on the menu?” Her voice smooths, melts into the consistency of syrup and sauce. “Mmm, that sounds wonderful. Yes. Let’s do that. Yes, room 1865. Thank you.”

Sakura emerges from the nest again, waving the phone receiver at Sasuke, who yanks the sheets around his hips with a scowl and hangs it up.

Holding his temple again, he rolls over to face her and hates that even with her hair in a tangle, coal smudged under her bright eyes, and remnant red lipstick dappling her skin as a canvas, she’s sublime and not a bit hungover. 

“So this is closer to the real you; drama with the other rich and famous, debasing hotel rooms with sin,” and here she trails fingernails down his already-marked chest, “being curt toward those that serve.”

His scowl sinks deeper, but she’s smiling. Then she giggles.

“You can’t even help it. But I understand it’s the morning.” 

Unsure of exactly what she’s poking fun at, he snatches her wrist and yanks it close. 

For a moment she can’t read those dark eyes, and a familiar chill skips down her spine. 

Between the presses of his mouth — kissing the bones of her wrist, her palm, each finger, his words vibrate in the marrow, con bravura, like fire: 

“You are . . . so full of noise.”

She’s simmering: pink in her cheeks, obsession in the skin. 

Breathlessly, she asks, “Where are my shoes?”

His reply is a rumble, eyes never leaving hers. “Last I felt them, they were propped on my—”

She shushes him; he retaliates by nipping at the skin of her finger. 

“I don’t think I’m frightening you enough, Sasuke.”

Grimly, he thinks perhaps she just makes him incredibly stupid.

“We hope to see you again soon.” It’s a prim, professional departing phrase. Sasuke and Sakura, both donning sunglasses and slouchy clothes in the manner of rumpled, clandestine vacationers, respond in expected fashion, the former with a surlier nod than usual courtesy of his hangover; Sakura smiles to make up for his lack of charm.

“Oh, one moment, miss,” the desk manager says, fluttering a hand. “This was left for you.” She proffers a sealed legal envelope; regarding it warily, Sakura takes it. Feels the weight of the heavy paper.

“Ah, thank you. I appreciate it.”

She tucks it under her coat with what she hopes is a nonchalant air. Sasuke raises an eyebrow. 

“I requested some information,” she supplies. “From some of the men I met last night. Some on boards and in universities and whatnot. I didn’t know they would respond so . . . enthusiastically?”

He scoffs, then winces. His touted tolerance seemed to be failing him this morning. “Perverted, enamored and self-important. How charming.” 

Linking her arm in his, she rests her head on his shoulder to hide her expression, the way her lips flatten at the lie. She’s terrified he’ll soon be able to decipher and deconstruct those as well as he already does the same to her body and its desires.

When they reach the curb, she gently takes him by the elbow.

“You need more sleep,” she says, “and I need to check on my apartment. Would it trouble you to take my bag back with you, to your place?”

This handsome man, with his shadows and hints of danger, simply pouts at her. “Is your building made of straw?”

“It’s my roommates,” she explains, shoulders sagging. “They’re just — they’re odd. They think it’s weird I haven’t been staying there. Plus two of them, well, they’re intense. One day they’ll actually set the place on fire.”

“Consider a different type of roommate.” _Consider me_. 

Fingers trailing off his arm, she uses the other hand to summon a cab. The corners of the legal envelope are sharp, unbending underneath her jacket.

This smile for him is flimsy, delicate. “Why trade one hazard for another?”

Something ominous appears in his face, then disappears swiftly as it came. 

Sakura doesn’t know if her attempt to kiss it away succeeds; she doesn’t look back as the cab leaves the curb.

Setting the envelope on the seat next to her, she takes her phone from her jacket pocket and turns it off. Rifling through her purse, she takes a paperclip and bends it into the desired, haphazard mimicry of a picking tool and relays an address to the driver. 

Guiding the metal to a tiny divot in the side of her phone, she opens the slot and tips the SIM card into her palm. Then, throws all of it back into her purse and twists at the waist to look out of the rearview window of the cab. 

The sky threatens rain. 

The workspace entrance is a painted door opening into the brick wall alley which momentarily disrupts the flow of the mural as patrons come and go. Though it’s a popular day for conversations and cafes, she spies a single computer booth open and rushes to claim it. The library had been another option, of course, but with everything monitored, this may be the better choice.

The tearing sound of the taped flap of the envelope sets her on edge. Sakura tries to steady her breathing, wondering how Hinata could have possibly managed to gather this so fast. Reaching into it, all she finds is a small and unbranded USB drive. 

Holding it between her forefinger and thumb, she clicks it into the public computer and starts to review the files. 

At first they’re things she already knows: _Uchiha Sasuke,_ a family with members in high places and hands in everything. Wealth that, to her, seems obscene. 

But her fingers are shaking on the mouse, pain searing her gut in the violent intuition of stalked prey; she’s clicking through faster, dredging up photocopies of scribbled police reports and staid financial statements with intimidating lines and court dates and candid snapshots of various dark-haired men (and women, too, an obvious proclivity for those resembling themselves, some unconscious desire for an unbroken line of black hair and regal noses) in beautiful rooms and descending jet stairs and even a classical, powerful shot of men with large shoulders coming toward the camera, down an expansive hallway with heads inclined in worldly orchestration, as women and media feather and flank the edges like gorgeous birds — except, Sakura thinks in a sidebar of hysteria, the men are almost more vivid and threatening in this case, just as their plumage and demeanor is so often in wildlife — 

_at 3:30 a.m. police officers are called to the estate by the family’s assistant, having discovered the bodies of whom they stated to be Uchiha Fugaku and Uchiha Mikoto_

grisly photos, black and white and crimson in color, all dark hair and wax skin and blood

_the youngest, Uchiha Sasuke, was located by the assistant facedown, prone, in the front lawn, unconscious but seemingly unhurt, spared for reasons unknown_

The memories she’s buried bubble to the surface; the scorch of his gaze, watching as her hand flies across the board, the magnificent orchestra din of beautiful, balanced chemical equations

_the eldest son and alleged suspect, Uchiha Itachi, apprehended after weeks of being on the run_

whispered conversations, empty classrooms, cold, ring-laden hands.

When she lands on the family photo, she gags into the hand she’s quickly slapped over her mouth, choking back the sound.

There they are, so young, both of the brothers pale and elegant even as children, with the delicate bones of those born into wealth and ease. Shadows ripple at their dignified edges, as if the dark reign is channeled into the firm hand that grips the oldest boy’s shoulder. The wife, whom she only saw once _or twice, who knows, can she remember anything anymore, can she trust anything she’s seen_ is dazzling, the bright spot in the photo as she holds the youngest on her hip. He pouts as he did just an hour before, an imprint of the past. 

Here she is swimming in the ignorance and bliss of fated encounters, all the dire warnings and vehement neuroses of her mother ringing in her ears, churning in the stomach, consoling and condemning the unearthly quality of her strange daughter to become entangled with things so much larger than herself. To blame her for it. And every synapse in her brain alights in panic as it all comes together so easily she’s amazed, again, she ever thought she was intelligent. 

She touches the screen, dragging fingers over each face as if reading by Braille.

Another wave of nausea ripples underneath her ribs, drains the saliva from her throat. Black and blank — her vision threatens to close in. 

A clink of china on wood: The barista peers at her with a detached politeness, concerned but wary as he sets down her order. “Miss?”

“Yes?” she gasps.

“Your order.” He shrugs with one shoulder, seeming to debate whether to press further. She’s aware she looks unhinged, one of those wandering people that roam looking for a warm urban oasis on an endless journey to nowhere. 

“Thank you, I — do you have a — can I print from here?”

Relief is visible in his face; not a crazy patron, just weird. “Sure, it should work. Can’t say many people want physical copies nowadays. It’s near the kitchen.”

She thanks him with a smile, acid burning at the back of her throat. 

Every single page, she sends to the printer. The mug cools and the steam eventually stops rising from it, abandoned. The realizations come and drown her in waves, that they’re _brothers_ , that she was telling Sasuke she was obsessed with _his brother,_ and all of it coalesces in a frantic runaway panic because how could he look her in the face and pretend . . .

and Itachi’s in prison, the consequence to her bringing him evidence, wanting him to confront the truth.

_“Itachi, you have to tell someone—”_

_He touches her forehead gently._

_“You sound like my little brother, earnest and sweet. No, I mean it as a compliment, I do — you still think it’s all good and evil, black and white.”_

and the police smoothed it out, washed it away, because while it’s usually a carnival to watch a famed family fall, no one wanted to be caught up in an investigation like this, a net gathering the small fish who leech off them,

and Sasuke came home to find them, the fatalities from her meddling.

Ripping the USB from the computer, she logs out and shoves the copies into the legal envelope, feeling the sand grains tick, tick through the hourglass, a narrowing of time forming a loop around the neck.

The rest is blurry, watching an old, grainy film disassociated from herself. Clutching the copies, thumb drive in hand as she returns to the painted alley. Dizzy, gasping. Crunching the source under the heel of her shoe and breaking fast. 

The brick wall is crying and when she briefly reconnects with reality again, so is she. 

Rain.

In the odd lightness, the cold city mist, she crouches on the pavement and spectacularly vomits. 

“The photos are everywhere, now.”

Naruto’s sheepish, apologetic, hunched over the kitchen table. Leaning on one arm, he flips through the contents of his phone camera with a face of concentration.

“Here’s the thing, Sasuke, the ones on the internet don’t match the ones Ino sent me. See?”

Seated at the other end of the table, Sasuke’s arms are folded tight as a straightjacket across his chest. The sneer that pulls at his lips is some overwrought combination of anger, hangover, and embarrassment. Shikamaru’s slightly less rigid and tight, but he’s deep in thought as well.

“You can’t do one fucking thing I ask,” Sasuke snaps. “Ino I expect — she doesn’t know me. But you know what it’s like to have your life plastered everywhere. To deal with that.”

“I’m sorry!” It’s a sincere apology, but whiny nonetheless. “I really didn’t think it’d become a big deal.”

“I don’t think this was you, Naruto. Hear me out!” Shikamaru raises his palms to Sasuke, whose mouth opens in anger. “He’s right. The photos I have don’t match anything taken at the actual event. Let’s assume there were journalists there, it makes sense, right? To cover such a big event?”

“He sent them to you too?” Sasuke snorts, shakes his head. “Let me guess, you sent them to your oil princess?” 

“Oi, that’s not really here nor there—”

“Shikamaru, you’re killing me here,” Naruto moans. 

“Maybe they were tipped off,” Shikamaru continues. “It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that with these names in attendance, and Neji Hyuuga at the helm, this is standard coverage. They happened to be distracted by a famous name that brings a lot of draw, and you happened to be with an attractive date.”

“She was _smokin’_ by the way,” Naruto interjects. Pointing at Shikamaru, he adds, “See what I did there?”

Air whistles through Sasuke’s nose with menace. 

“It could be nothing, just a coincidence. Happenstance. Circumstances.” Shikamaru shrugs.

Sasuke raises his eyes to both of them in turn. “But you don’t believe that.”

In the intervening pause, there’s the sound of a key in the lock. Sakura opens the door to find them all in the kitchen in various states of solemnity, the discussion weighing on the atmosphere.

No one speaks as she drags herself over the threshold and kicks the door shut behind her. Waterlogged, pink locks plastered to her face and eyes ringed red and racooned underneath, she clutches a dry legal envelope bulging with who-knows-what and on top of that, letters Sasuke recognizes as originating from the prison, all of which he’s been disposing.

On cue, his phone buzzes, clatters against the counter in an ominous rhythm as it signals a fated intrusion.

“Please get out.”

No one responds. Naruto, stupidly, makes an attempt.

“Sakura, um, I can get you a—”

“Be quiet.”

Shikamaru does that careful, distancing raise of the palms again, a physical barrier between him and anger as he edges around her space, giving a wide berth. Sasuke knows better than to move, and can feel her eyes on him tearing him to his core, a rabid, frenzied flock of birds. 

“H-hey,” Naruto tries again, standing up with a hand outstretched. “If this about the blog photos—”

Eyes green and crazed, she slaps everything in her hands onto the table: Papers in one hand, keys in the other. The keys clatter, and the letters go skidding. 

“Get. Out.”

“Ooookay.” Naruto gingerly flattens himself against the wall, sliding out of her grasp and toward the front door. Shikamaru’s lingering, glancing between Sasuke and Sakura but ultimately decides to leave. 

The click of the lock triggers her flight: Sasuke stands, stumbles, finds himself flush against the counter with her small fists beating on his chest. He knows if she wanted, she could leave him with a gorgeous bruise or a broken nose; this is shattered, despairing, unbelieving, whatever’s pouring out of her as she crumbles, clay, as he tries to get a grip on her. She seems to sift and slip through his hands in some alien way. 

“I thought—” Breaks off, a throaty sound somewhere between a sob of mirth and anger. “I thought you were just hiding a smoking habit. You think I couldn’t smell it on you?”

She leaves him, breathing hard, faces the letters scattered on the table. He lets out air, rabbitquick, inhales again, trying to quell the prickling and ominous foreboding crawling at the base of his neck.

“You’ve been burning them. He found me, and you knew—”

“I don’t read them, Sakura.” Dropping pretense, now that they both know. “I don’t know how he found me, but—”

“You wouldn’t tell me what he went to prison for. You didn’t even tell me his _name!_ ”

Sasuke has the sense he’s missing a crucial piece. “What would that matter?” 

With a frustrated wail, Sakura sweeps her arm across the table and sends everything flying, the keys becoming a heavy, weighted shotput that ricochets against a cabinet and drops.

Sasuke closes the space between them in two swift strides and takes her by the wrists. Yanks her close, face in her face, and hisses

“He’s dead to me.”

“So dead that he’s writing to you? Found your phone number? Don’t—” she snaps at him, heading off his protests, “—I’m not that stupid. Well, I must be! How could you — how could you play this game with me?”

“It’s none of your business. None. He has nothing to do with you, with us.”

She flinches, mouth opening and closing before she’s able to choke out,

“He has everything to do with this.”

“Sakura.” His head begins shaking slowly, words following in similar, measured fashion: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Her expression transforms, confusion to a spark of understanding and finally to horror.

“You _don’t_ know.” 

_eyes on the back of her neck, or perhaps her hands flying across the board, she never knows what he’s looking at and wishes he’d just kiss her, because that’s something she understands, boys like girls, not whatever this is, the way he observes her with this intolerable heat_

Quaking in Sasuke’s grip, she closes her eyes. “Sasuke. It was him. Itachi was my tutor.”

Silence so heavy it fractures time as glass. 

She continues.

“I know now that . . . he’s in prison.” She pauses again. “Itachi is—”

“— my brother.” He finishes the sentence, he thinks, anyway; a surreal tone lost in the void, perhaps it never left his mouth at all. 

The world opens up to swallow him whole, the sense of unreality wholly consuming; he sways like she’s hit him, but as he crouches and finally sits on the kitchen floor she comes with him, equally stunned. She sounds faint and far away as she rests her forehead on his, her spine bowed, running her fingers over the same spot on his chest as if she’ll wear out the skin down to glossy white bone. Words like a talisman chant, though the roaring in his ears drowns so much of it out.

“I didn’t know when I met you, I didn’t know, Sasuke—”

“He was your—” Chest collapsing, crushing his lungs. Memories steal his air, and Itachi is the string that entangles them past and future, and it’s sick how in this second it’s not about him never knowing about her, always feeling on the outside of his beloved but inscrutable brother’s life, bereft of the bond he so wanted and unable to understand him, but rather it’s the agonizing sensation of roots burrowing in his chest, his wanton jealousy, or is this envy, covetous, and his brother truly ruined everything, leaving a trail of devastation in his wake, because he’s taken their parents and ruined every normality but fuck him, he will not take _her — !_

Sasuke advances on her, hands and knees, but she’s scrabbling backward on the heels of hands and feet until her back’s against the wall, kneeling between her thighs and he’s so close the words flutter on her neck, rich, with heat — 

“Why did he do it?”

“I’m s-sorry, I’m so sorry.” 

“Tell me everything,” he hisses.

“Sasuke—”

“Everything!” At his shout, she flinches. “Every fucking thing you knew about him!” 

Unhinged, unraveling, as if he’s watching himself disintegrate from the other side of the room, a voyerish spectacle of his own insanity. Because it isn’t her fault but the thoughts in his head come a savage rush, _the girl that turned his brother’s head, the girl his father hated,_ because even in his brother’s neurosis and oddity and flouting of principles he still, always, was golden and loved in a way that Sasuke never could quite achieve. 

This woman, sweeping into his life as a hurricane, the sublime crux and keeper of the brother he couldn’t reach. 

Sakura shivers in the wake of his explosion, cracked open and spilling like black ink, a curse that stains hands and hearts.

An odd gleam in her puffy green eyes surfaces as she accepts it, the absurdity of it, this, them. She touches his face with kindness he’s beyond deserving, and for a moment, it’s not so impossible to conceive that his brother saw this — her unearthly quality, the sense that the world moves through her rather than the other way ‘round, an aperture in times and spaces and lives so fleeting and always on the ragged edge of disappearing, impossible to capture or cage. 

And he could kiss her; oh, he could kill her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Opener: Talking Myself in Circles - Four Year Strong
> 
> The room number, 1865, comes from the painting, _Antigone in front of dead Polynikes_ (Polynices), by Nikiforos Lytras.
> 
> Can't believe ya'll still reading this hah
> 
> Working on a sequel/companion/something to [Red](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26054191) but I don't have a date on that so whoop
> 
> There's also a new graveyard for scraps of ideas that I want to do things with but haven't outlined or sussed out, so it's like a visit to your local dump, you know? 
> 
> As always, say hi, leave hearts if you like I don't bite


	10. X

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Tell me about the man you knew.” Fingers feather his hair, tentative, tender. “Tell me about him through your eyes, the person who was your brother.” 
> 
> “I want to know who he was to _you._ ” 
> 
> She exhales his name in a quiet breath, a flutter with a reedy edge. Twilight tones. “I didn’t quite know before, and now I’m only certain I knew even less.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: everyone is morally questionable, the usual

**X.**

_Chunks of you will sink down to seals  
_ _blubber rich in mourning,  
_ _they'll nosh you up, yes, they'll nosh the love away b_ _ut it's fair to say  
_ _you will still haunt me_

❦

Time is a fast and loose fugue state consisting only of two. 

He doesn’t know when he ended up with _his_ back against the wall, palms damp and pressed to the kitchen floor. Blurry vision and furious, hysterical beats of the heart. Pink flits in and out of his vision, frolic and flourish, glimmering as the alien undulation of smooth muscle. 

Some things Sasuke remembers:

The way his brother would come home later and later, twilight pressing on until the threat of dawn. Occasionally with his father, rarely accompanied by their mother, and most often alone.

The way his eyes would simmer as blackened coal, every time they’d bring up this _girl_. A girlfriend, he’d assumed, a crush he’d never be able to indulge in anyway because Uchiha marriages were transactions, not spectacles — arrangements of wealth, never fond affairs. Lingering as a sour taste, the expectations and jealousy: After all, most things came to him easily as first son. 

_“She’s better off being brought into the fold than left on her own.”_ Itachi’s detached way of speaking, always lost in some wild pocket of his own universe, folding in on itself until he would fade around the edges. Lost even to Sasuke.

 _“We don’t do it this way!”_ Why was his father so angry about it, though, really? 

_“She knows too much — what would you have me do? She’s headstrong, just a girl.”_

Never privy to his parents’ hushed conversations, often existing on the outside of their bubble, the glossy rounded edge of a buffer that burst upon their deaths. 

_“You truly are a gentle child. If you think that would make her happy, we can discuss it.”_

But Sasuke had flattened himself against the wall, young and wild-haired and often overlooked. Sure enough, his father’s eyes slid over him easily, never seeing him when he growls to himself, _but we’re trying my way first._

Some things Sakura remembers: 

Leather seats, the paranoia of eyes, and chemical equations wrought into real-world consequences. 

How elegant their mother was, _I did meet her,_ kind and taking her hands so gently and looking at Sakura as though she were real too. Valued. Beguiling as she asked through a smile, _What exactly do you want with my son?_

Trying to look a grown man in the eyes, but watching the sour corners of his downturned mouth instead, a tall stack of paper between them on a table of polished wood.

 _Girls have to be strong,_ she said, pulling her hands back from the beautiful woman, _in order to survive._

And their mother regards her for a poignant moment, staring down at the contract between them.

_“That they do, dear. That they do.”_

Cupboards clatter in impending doom, claps of thunder in his ears — though those could be from outside and the boundary is blurry.

“Here,” Sakura breathes, wrapping her slim fingers around his clammy ones to force them around an object in his hand. To work life and heat back into them. 

Glass. Cold. 

His world sharpens in a manner so jarring it beckons vomit. She’s kneeling and sopping wet with tears in her eyes, murmuring as she presses the frigid glass to his lips and tips, tips the clear spirits down his throat — 

Singeing, sputtering, but he follows the warmth inside to the ends of his fingers, wishing errantly to melt into the soft burn in his own chest.

When he finally lifts his eyes to her, she drains her glass and winces, sheepish.

“I hope you don’t mind . . . my head’s spinning from all this.”

Even in the haze, the odd sense of float, a base urge to swipe a thumb under her eyes to touch the glitter and sloe mess. Exactly like him, to be drawn to wreckage.

“I knew there was someone.”

Sasuke’s low voice tears her from the past and ties her to the present. 

He notes the liquor in his glass with a flat mundanity; a measured pour, a medicinal amount. 

“An outsider, something that muddled him up, made my father furious. I was fine with it — Itachi acting like a normal person, with a dumb crush.” His burning chest has less to do with inebriant and so much to do with envy. “It made me a little less jealous, that he wasn’t so perfect.”

“I was dumb,” she says, voice harsh. “You don’t understand how much of this I caused.”

Sasuke blinks, long and slow. Still not feeling quite tethered to reality. “We’re the same age, Sakura. He should’ve known better—”

“Tell me about the man you knew.” Fingers feather his hair, tentative, tender. “Tell me about him through your eyes, the person who was your brother.” 

“I want to know who he was to _you.”_ His tone cuts to the quick, steel on flint.

She exhales his name in a quiet breath, a flutter with a reedy edge. Twilight tones. “I didn’t quite know before, and now I’m only certain I knew even less.”

Sitting with that careful distance from one another in loving orbit, like that first morning, treading in fateful fjords with the surreality and prickling sense of déjà vu. 

As he takes a preparatory sip, relishing the sting, he wonders how exactly she knows he’s prone to being a scattered mess that loses his charm and intelligence when the drink takes him and shakes him by the lapels of his soul. She’s never seen those stumbles or fights. It occurs to him she has the uncanny, terrifying intuition reminiscent of his mother — a minim above baseline perception. 

His tongue, it stings. He swallows down the tastes of her lipstick and lime, tartness from hours and days prior that doesn’t make sense here, not now.

“I thought Itachi had it all the moment he was born.” Knowing he sounds petulant at best, he shifts his gaze and focuses on something invisible far past her pink, damp hair. “The first son, set to inherit the family business. When you check all the right boxes for a pious, intelligent, desired heir, the second son gets to slip by, unnoticed. I didn’t have to be anything.”

Sakura’s eyes feel like pity, and he continues staring into the past.

“When we were children, before things changed, he was a great brother, objectively. I aspired to be like him — everything seemed easy for him, but he never condescended or denied me time. Him and I often felt we only had one another. Our parents were always occupied with other things.”

A gleam of green. Sasuke doesn’t notice her reaction.

“He reached the age where he went to the boys’ school, like all Uchiha and children of our group. Hyuuga Neji was there, and so was Naruto despite his thickheadedness.” A pause. “Our parents all knew one another, doing business in the same circles. This insular, strange club of the wealthy and connected. Still,” and for a moment their eyes meet, but he breaks it so fast so _fast_ because the spark is acute as a splinter lodged in the chest, “a lot of us, at that age, don’t know exactly what it all means. Money you can’t see.”

“You were young. I’m guessing none of you were told particulars.”

Sasuke doesn’t ask for the reasoning behind her surety, figuring it will come in due time.

“At some point, Naruto’s parents and mine had a falling out. It meant nothing to us, boys, beating each other up one day and best friends again the next. To this day, I don’t know all of it, and before they—” Sasuke swallows, hard, “ —they were killed, we never heard the story.”

Sakura’s rigid, if she could be more so than she already was while listening. “You’re saying Naruto’s parents—”

“He’ll tell you they died in a freak accident. Records show it, anyway, that they intervened in a mugging. But the further I get away from all of these memories . . .” he trails off, throat desiccated, drained. Taking a restrained sip from his glass, he lets the implication dissipate. She sees the haunting afterimages in the air, microfilms of things unsaid. 

[On the other side of the door,

Shikamaru’s skin reflects the color of the bald and garish lights above — robs him of life and leaves him as withered parchment.

He motions to the other two, and when Naruto doesn’t notice nor rouse from his reverie it falls on Ino to grasp him desperately by the sleeve and tug, to reconnect him with reality.]

“Around the same time, Itachi’s never home. It had been happening for a while, him traveling with my parents, particularly my father, on what I assumed were some sort of business trips, training, familiarizing him with our operations or whatever was involved. Always vague details: Refineries, financials, hospitality in this country, consulting in another. I was young, it seemed boring, but it was hard to feel ignored. I was angry, resentful, childish.”

Another sip. 

“Family members come around more often, some I haven’t seen for awhile. If they were involved in business, they were indistinguishable from blood. Complicated relationships and traditions my parents understood, a rite of passage to be included in. I always remember one of them. Older than me.” Sasuke tries to meet her eyes again, but the intensity of her frozen gaze gleams as glass, fracturing his own vision. “He was an orphan, no parents to speak of. I didn’t even know if he was actually related to me, but he was . . . an oddly happy person. For one of us, I mean.”

A skittering giggle, nervous, bubbles from Sakura’s chest and leaves her lips. 

“Of course, he had an accident at some point. It changed him. It’s a curse,” he spits, tipping the glass back again. The swallow doesn’t touch the dread, doesn’t even leave an imprint in the hollow hate. “Uchiha men never seem to make it out whole.”

A silence stretches. In the intervening pause, rain lashes at the windows accompanied by the rolling cascade of thunder, a background arpeggio. 

She waits for him to resurface; the irony of her own waterlogged state, having already clutched the shore and fought the current.

“I heard about a girl, that I now know was you. It just sounded like a thing I could tease him about, try to make him open up. By that time, he felt so far away and I would have done anything for his attention. My mother thought it was sweet. My father hated it, like he seemed to hate everything.”

 _“Tell me about her, Itachi. What does she look like — like mom?” His haughty voice, swinging between its impending metamorphosis and crackling high pitch, the embarrassing markers of adolescence. It comes out in sing-song: “You gonna_ **_marry_ ** _her?”_

_Itachi’s lined face always appears older than it should look, forever strained but somehow finespun. The soft upturn of the lips he attempts stretches more like a grimace._

_“She doesn’t deserve that.”_

_Twisted, that it later ends up being his suggestion to stitch the rift she’s opened, to sew closed the aperture of his mistakes._

Sakura bites her lip, blanching it white.

“He loved you, didn’t he?” It escapes before he can cage it, regretting how it sounds like an accusation. 

Where does she get the grace not to take it as one? He hates and loves her fingers worrying the seam of his shirt, though still she doesn’t meet his gaze. 

“I’ve been wrong on a lot of things, Sasuke . . . but I don’t think he loves quite like normal people.”

“But he spent all his time with you. He told you secrets.”

“He was . . . odd. Always like he was alone in his own mind. And everyone does that, right? We have a safe place that we can retreat to, but if you look closely enough, you can see it in someone’s eyes.”

“It wasn’t just tutoring, was it?”

Stricken, she digs her fingernail in to place pressure on the woven seam. Her throat’s dry, tempting urges for another draft. She says, “I dug too deeply, wanted to feel special. I wanted his gaze to be clear when he looked at me.”

Bringing his glass to his mouth, Sasuke realizes there’s nothing left. He startles as her fingers intertwine with those of his free hand, latching in a way that epitomizes reckless requests of forgiveness. 

Searing, their pitiless kinetic heat.

“For the first weeks, he hardly ever spoke to me. I always stayed late, there, or the library. Everyone thought I was always studying — for the love of science.” The punctuating laugh is something melancholy. “When the truth was, since no one could ever pick me up, I had to take the last bus out of town. Every night.”

Sasuke always forgets those cheerless details, the missing pieces of her childhood she doesn’t say aloud. 

“He’d correct work without comment on the board, here and there, but watched in silence. You know, I’m sure, his mannerisms. The way he was. He’d never come close to me, an invisible, repelling force between us. A careful thing.”

Sasuke’s dark eyes memorize the lines between the tiles, fingers still laced in hers. Longing to dive into them, the spaces in between, a sojourn in endless nullity. 

“One day he gives me an equation, a difficult one. Impossible, really; it seemed like a test. He had papers with him. Said it was something even adults had trouble with. I remember resenting it, pouting; a sure way to fail.”

_She watches his pale hands write the equation across the board; he never does it for her. Fading eventide catches his rings, scatters light. Unsure of what she’s feeling, foreboding, butterflies or a stomachache._

“I’m frustrated, really pissed, actually. I curse about it, but after a couple hours, I figured it out. When you solve something you’ve been struggling over, that sense of triumph . . . like you’re in the right groove again. I tossed the marker down, feeling so smug — I remember it so clearly. We were the last people there.” She laughs again, fragile, a winter branch splintering in the cold.

Sasuke understands, especially when it comes to Itachi. The desire to put a crack in his constant veneer, but also to vie for his approval however slight. 

“He stares at the board for what seems like forever. Honestly, I was just hoping for a reaction, anything.” But she deftly edits the part 

_when he pokes her forehead and she flushes, because she hates her forehead and he’s so adult and it makes her feel dumb but also warm, like perhaps he could look at her as more than a girl he tutors_

_and he doesn’t say if she gets it right, but he’s offering her coat and saying, “You’re too young to be taking the bus so far. My driver will take you.”_

_In this car too nice for her, with these textured seats that make soft noises against a mausoleum's sealed silence, just the two of them, he’s ignoring her all over again, ringed hands folded in his lap._

_“You’re rude!”_

_She’s red, embarrassingly so, the flush from her face heating the entire space. But she doesn’t stop._

_“Why would you give me something so difficult if I was just going to fail? It’s just mean.”_

_“You didn’t get it wrong,” he says lightly, without looking at her._

_Days slide into weeks — of him presenting increasingly complicated work, of Ino asking her where she always is, of hours in a classroom with his eyes on her in a way that feels like twine poised to snap._

“Whatever it was, I got it right. It got more and more difficult, and I realized most of it had nothing to do with my classwork. Not that it mattered, because school was easy in comparison. We talked about me wanting to be a doctor. I hope you can understand,” she says, squeezing Sasuke’s fingers, “I had no one else to tell. No one else understood. Ino was suspicious, I didn’t have a ton of real friends. If I hadn’t been so stupid—”

“What did your parents say?”

But he regrets the question the moment it leaves his mouth; after all, where had his always been?

His scalp crawls — did they know? 

“We really didn’t understand one another. My dad accepted it the best he could, that this school was for the best. But my mother . . .”

The flat tone almost disguises the wavering, the vibrato functioning as her voice.

“She barely believed I was her own daughter. Everything was a fight. Brushing her off was easiest.”

Sasuke knows a large part of the family business had to do with refineries. Boring, nothing he’s ever taken an interest in. There was an accident one year, the press plastering it into public prominence, touting it as an unusual incident considering the preeminent track record of most Uchiha-owned ventures. 

The remnants of liquor in Sasuke’s throat rot into acrid dregs. 

“Itachi wanted you to work for the family.” He says it as fact. “Our father would have said no; he hated uncontrolled variables.”

Sakura’s crushing his fingers, her strength alien and paralyzing. “I don’t think it became a real option until I was in too deep. You didn’t know then, but I bet you know now.”

Sasuke nods, stony. He’s had time to process it by now, all the things that came to light during the case in which Itachi admits guilt without a fight, concedes he’s guilty of parricide, there’s no ugly public trial or televised spectacle, just more money changing hands to solve problems that regular processes never do. _He ran, but admitted it in the end._ The family assets come to him, and he’s not so ignorant to know he wants out, out of all the business and mess and he doesn’t care that it’s less money in the end because it’s still obscene and stained. 

Sasuke returns only for the verdict and buyout, flees again shortly after — never visits the old estate or the prison, his newly-orphaned best friend always at his side.

_“Show me.”_

_Itachi’s mouth is a thin, grim line. “You’re a mere girl.”_

_“I’m not dumb. These are clearly not legitimate businesses.”_

_He doesn’t expect her to say it out loud. It’s futile to deny it, yet that’s his first mistake._

_And then he makes so many more, a million unraveling strings. Her naïve and strong sense of justice; the way she throws his papers at him in the car that fateful night on the way to take her home, disbelieving and panicked; the darkness that steals his sleep, sinking the lines into his face; the way she begs him to please, do the right thing, to take that unthinkable nuclear option; the way he slips up with her, poking her forehead and fuck he’s an idiot, brushing the hair off her face when she cries and he’d never tell her that she’s too bright for him to look at head-on while everything she says is the bitter truth, family curses handed down divine —_

_“The people you hurt with this, those are people like my Mom and Dad.” Lip trembles as she crushes herself into the smallest corner of the car, against the door. “Normal, average people. Who work hard their whole life, and don’t get many choices.”_

“But do you know what it’s like, when a neighbor confronts your mom at the only market in town about why the good girl comes home late in a nice car with a man?”

The tears come fast, welling up and cutting salty tributaries through smudged remains under her eyes. She continues.

“Do you know what it’s like when someone thinks they can buy everything with money — your silence, your knowledge, your life?”

But that _was_ his life, he reflects. Wealth and power always present, smoothing over the uncomfortable and inconvenient cracks. 

“Tell me,” Sasuke says, “did you take what was offered?”

“Which offer? See,” and here her eyes are foreboding, hard, sea-glass polished by sand, “your father first wanted me to sign a contract where I took the money and made myself scarce. Dangled false security in front of me, for my parents too. I could be a doctor and they would pay for it, fulfill my dream, as long as I went somewhere else, and never came into contact with any of you again.”

Dark, stone, frigid. Sasuke doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe. 

“Or,” she hisses, “Itachi had the stupid idea of trying to marry me in.”

“What?”

“Planned for when I was of age, but still a contract. He knew that I was soft for him. Unorthodox,” she snorts, twisting a lock of her own hair, “but you keep the secrets closer. It’s a smart play for control.”

Sasuke yanks her by the hand, faces close as he abandons all fear for the indulgence of wanton, unbridled anger.

“You were a _girl,”_ he hisses. 

“So Uchiha men seem to always remind me,” she retorts, haughty. “A girl playing an adult’s game.”

“It’s—”

“Don’t you all have arranged marriages anyway?”

“Don’t you fucking tell me,” he growls, “that you considered it.”

“See, that’s what you don’t get.” There’s an edge of irritation, a weary patience. “You were kept from a lot of these awful things _because_ of Itachi. He didn’t want you to know how dark it all was, how deep this went. And me, well,” she laughs without a stitch of humor, lips curling as if she’s trying not to laugh, trying not to cry, “I was in a bad position. I’m sure you know by now that somewhere between the chemistry tutoring and the murder, I became a liability. So what’s a girl to do — a girl with no means, trying to fly too close to the sun and instead crawling in the dark?”

“It wasn’t your fault.” 

“All I knew is that your family held all the cards.” She pauses, sighs. “But I said no. I rejected every offer. I didn’t threaten to reveal anything. I just wanted to be left alone, pretend I’d never met him. Compartmentalize that unfortunate incident into a tiny box in the corner of my mind, lose the key.”

But Sasuke knows just as well as he knows he’s grown in her soil, absorbed her eerie light, that all those things cling as webs and rarely, if ever, leave.

The silence between them stretches, allowing the thunder’s rumbling a chance to be heard.

“Why did he do it?”

“Which part of it, Sasuke?” She sounds tired, faint. 

“The ridiculous contracts.” If he lets go of her hand she’ll sink through the floor, and he’ll dissipate as dust. “The proposal of—” He growls instead, unable to finish the sentence. “Choosing you in the first place for his plans, his fucking mess?”

She has no answers. Her hand shakes in his.

“Why did he kill them, Sakura?”

“Are you wondering if he did it for me? Gods, Sasuke . . . I pushed him to blow the whistle, but only that. Not murder. After carrying around the pain that I’d, even indirectly, caused the refinery accident, you think I’d want more blood on my hands?”

“They’re still dead, and I need more answers.”

“So start with the letters! He’s been sending you them, and you haven’t read a single one?”

Words skirting the precipice: When he invades her space in the most wonderful way, eyes glittering and searching for the skeletons of her buried demons, the urge to drown’s becoming less and less of a choice.

“I’ve waited years! I’ve been laboring under false impressions and half-told tales and whispers of the family I left. It's not enough. I need the truth. I want — I need —”

_I need to know if I’m insane too._

It’s nothing he has to speak aloud: She knows.

Sasuke changes tack in an almost manic shift. “Have you ever flown anywhere?”

“What, like on an airplane?” She says a quiet _tuh!_ under her breath and fingers the ends of her damp hair. Stares at the tiled floor. “Like I’m some bumpkin.”

He abruptly gets to his feet, registering just the ragged edge of a buzz that’s bleeding away faster than he can ache for it back. He leaves wordlessly and returns with a towel, crouching in front of her. 

She watches him with a wary expression.

“Once,” she murmurs. 

He’s mulling over how to say the next words but he’s not moving fast enough. 

“No, Sasuke. Why would you even think of doing it?”

But he doesn’t answer, instead tossing the towel over her head and squeezing it around locks of her hair, trying to soak up the remainder of the rain. Much easier not to look her in the eyes as her protests mount.

“Write him back! Call him, even; that’s who’s been calling, right? Confronting him, sitting across from him in a cold room — what’s the use of that?”

“Answers. I deserve them, and so do you.”

Now her hands flail, trying to yank the fabric off her head to glower at him. “I’ve settled it, okay? It’s why I ran. Things were lost, and I accepted it and never looked back.”

He settles on his haunches, all hard edges and ominous energy. “This is the path I walk. I won’t make you. Obviously, no one’s quite able to make you do anything you don’t want. But if you’re scared of him, if you don’t want to reopen this — I understand that.”

Lips thin, she feathers him apart with her sharp eyes and brushes the cold and dark something she’s wanted and feared since the moment she met his eyes across a bar, across a book, across the abstruse knots of fate and destiny. 

“Do you do this a lot?” she whispers. “Eschew the things that make sense and take the long and winding road?” 

“Only, it seems, since I met you.”

A tinge of discomfort in his admission; he resumes toweling her hair to mask his embarrassment.

“You said you’d follow me anywhere. You said it that first night.” Again, his shift in topic, seeking some unspoken answer. 

“That was stupid of me.” A beat. Sakura’s voice is almost inaudible as she continues, “I’ve also said I don’t stay.”

“Once this is over — once I figure this out, I’ll go where you need me. It will only be us.”

_I’m yours._

“Sasuke—”

“Sakura.” Grasping the ends of the towel that’s slid around her neck and shoulders, he pulls her close, speaking against her temple. Silencing any protests as he says,

“I’m awake.”

It’s another agonizing minute before she responds.

“You’re an idiot, then.”

“Ah. Perhaps.”

_(But we’re just wreckage, you and I.)_

  
  


  
Later, on the floor, on the rug dappled with the glitter of nights and trysts before, they lie in a helter-skelter nest of haphazard bedding and fragile love.

“He never wanted this for you, you know.”

Her whispers reach him unearthly and clear amid thunder rumblings and the gentle lilting of the radio’s twilight programming, whispers in hushed rooms just out of the mind’s grasp.

Green eyes following the electrical fractures in the sky, fingers intertwined in his. There’s something about her, in the flickering half-light, that has Sasuke wondering at the ideas of destiny and doom. 

“Itachi was . . . crumbling under the weight of what he was about to inherit. What he learned. It became something he couldn’t keep holding onto.”

The radio is quiet, murmurs gnawing at the ragged edges of shared insomnia. Beckoning from a void.

“But no matter what, I think he always loved you.”

Sasuke knows if he articulates the thoughts on his mind she’ll find him insane at worst, unhinged at best — the room spinning and them clinging to one another in the semidarkness because letting her leave his life could bring something worse, a calamity to which he’s unable to bring coherence.

Lying in coils and knots woven by paths chosen long before them.

Lying on the floor as lovers and strangers, souls dipped in endless gold. 

  
  


Only in the simmering ruby dawn when Sakura’s padding around the kitchen to wake up the day with caffeine, intent on packing her suitcase does she realize 

_(red sky at morning, sailors take warning —_ is that how the mariner’s ode goes?)

one of those photos is of _her,_ would have been taken many days ago before even meeting Hinata Hyuuga, and she touches the corner of it with her finger which sends a shiver of terror skittering down the spine

_(the goddess is playing, with whom no man can fight)_

as the utter unlikelihood of the snapshot being included settles heavy in the marrow of her bones since it doesn’t make much sense, none at all

and it begs the question of who really sent her the evidence.

Sakura stares at herself in the photo, an image of her loitering near the radio station after a shift, painted in wan grey against an ink-stained night — 

— and the darkness watches her back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Opener - _Tessellate_ originally by Alt-J, also covered by Ellie Goulding. 
> 
> Hi all, it's been a while! Thought I had covid, tested negative, was a bit sick for a while, it was a whole thing. Still here, just perhaps with slower updates because I'm back at work for full weeks, other projects crying for attention, and ALSO it's NaNoWriMo! 
> 
> Readers you are literal gold, for real, thank you so much for your kudos/favorites/subscrips/comments, it does mean a lot even when I update slow AF. 
> 
> I hang out on Twitter here [@psalloacappella](https://twitter.com/psalloacappella)
> 
> and also this is posted on ff.net if that's anyone's speed [FFN](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13600962/1/Sirens)


	11. XI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The words come out and he knows they’re too much as they leave his mouth: 
> 
> “You love her, don’t you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> breakneck speed and bodies

**XI.**

_Come closer to me, baby,  
_ _I've got everything you need  
_ _to fill your hunger pains for tonight_

❦

Two inmates watch Uchiha Itachi linger near a fence at the perimeter of the yard. 

Always with his discomforting duality: A knife’s edge of menace dovetailed with some unarticulated vulnerability. How difficult it can be to believe, as he tilts his head to observe the bird chirping and bobbing on his hand acting as makeshift tree branch, that he’s a murderer and mastermind, orchestrator of extensive criminal networks. 

The rumors stretch and transform, each tall tale more convoluted and torrid than the last. The man himself does nothing to dissuade them; there’s hardly anyone he speaks to except his towering friend, a man whose so obviously wandered straight out of the ocean, onto land, and into prison with how closely his square skull resembles a shark’s. 

Frankly, Itachi looks more like a man sick and exhausted, gone dim. 

“Fuckin’ small,” one inmate grunts. Folding thick barrel arms across his broad chest, they’re difficult to fit together easily. Exercise, one of the last havens and habits of committed system prisoners. “And he’s talkin’ to birds; fruitcake.” 

“You haven’t been here long,” his companion says. “For a man like that to make it through, his reputation has to be enough. No one bothers him. Murdering your parents is standard for here. It’s not his crime — it’s _him._ ”

“Don’ believe it,” the other snorts. “The wind’d blow him over.” 

“Don’t get close to him.” He gives the first a significant look, expression plain. Serious. “He’s a dangerous man.”

“Oh c’mon. You afraid of a scrawny punk?” Punches his closed fist into the other hand in a careless display of bravado, winding up. The _pop!_ of knuckles on skin draws Itachi’s attention from the bird and he levels his gaze at them across the drab yard, hard eyes skimming the cracked concrete and neglected brown grass. 

Itachi and the seasoned inmate share the tiniest incline of the head, a firm nod. Once. 

The latter yanks the newcomer prisoner by the upper arm and pulls him close. 

“If the wrong person in this place wants you to disappear, you will. A guard will choke you a little too hard, let someone stab you in the mess hall. Turn deaf to yer screams. Plant something during bedtoss and throw you in SHU.” His companion’s visibly wilting now, wary. “How many ways you think men can make weapons in here?”

A beast of a man with an odd undersea tinge to the skin strides across the yard toward Itachi. It distracts the initiate for a moment, but his superior’s eyes demand understanding. Acknowledgement of the pecking order, the hazards of his new life. 

It stretches before him, the horrifying prospect of forever.

Releasing him roughly, space between them again, his tone is inflexible, leaves no room for riposte. 

“Don’t fuck around. He’s never put his hands on another man in this prison, and he doesn’t have to.” 

  
  
  


“Fresh fish?” Kisame asks. Small, pointy teeth bared in a grin that he brandishes at the two men across the yard, relishing in the way one of them looks like he might just lose his lunch in fear. 

Itachi doesn’t answer, just waves the small bird off his finger with a quiet sigh.

“Is that your new thing?” Kisame has a way, gruffly, of sounding concerned in throwaway. Gives a shit, if only a little. Everyone needs someone to watch your back when staring down the barrel of a life sentence. “No response from your little brother, so you’re channeling the birds now?”

Knowing one another as they do, years of being oddly-paired and somehow suited, he ignores Itachi’s deafening silence — a manner of exclusion as if they’re floating in the airless vacuity of outer space. After all, who’s quite normal in a high-security prison population? Though Kisame, at least, manages to maintain a certain violent, jolly charm, his opposite is mute in his best times and on another planet at worst.

“And if you wonder how I know,” Kisame continues, “the man in the mailroom finds me interesting. Spills more in an afternoon than you have in years.”

This earns him a brief raise of the eyebrows, a glance at the sky. From Itachi it’s the equivalent of a flashing neon sign. Sensing a crack in his façade, his friend continues.

“There’s more.”

Despite himself, Itachi’s eyes flicker. Kisame’s grin stretches wide.

“Pretty people really do get all the attention. He’s heading here. What’s his name? Sasuke?”

“I see.”

Kisame startles dramatically at the response. “It speaks.”

“You’re tiring.”

“ _You’re_ tiring; look at your awful mug. Ever think about getting checked out? Prisoners’ rights,” he says sardonically. 

Interpreting Itachi’s offended silence correctly, he skirts the topic and continues. 

Itachi’s eyes are lost somewhere in the blue, the new knowledge given his only earthly tether. Kisame never knows what he’s looking for out there, searching or seeking or hoping for symbolism and signs that perhaps, once he finds them, will unlock his keys or at least cheer him up for a day. Then again, who is he to ask others to be optimistic — it’s prison. 

Still, who else would he incessantly bother if he loses the other half, his foil, his glue? Frowning at his own sentiment, Kisame clears his throat. 

“There’s more, Itachi.”

“Ah, you’ve said that.”

“He’s not alone.”

Single black shadow arcing against the blue, now taking on the blush of sunset colors like new bruises. A crow. Itachi focuses on it.

“There’s a girl with him. Young thing working the flight gossips to the pilot, who’s got friends in law, cops, prison head. How it always goes.” Shrugging, he’s not sure if the tidbit is of any interest and loathes himself a little for being nosy but again, _prison._ What else is there to look forward to?

Eyes the same glittering sable tint as the crow’s, Itachi’s still following its innate and instinctive whorls carried in the fabric of its biology, down to its genetic markers lighting up in complicated ancient circuits. Directed by a story much older than itself.

“What color is her hair?”

Kisame peers at him like he’s gone daft in the span of their conversation.

“Why the fuck would I know that?

The _thwack!_ of the large bird’s body against the thick glass rouses a few bodies from sleep and prompts cursing from others. Sakura’s expression falls as she contemplates what surely was misguided fowl, off its migratory track and discombobulated by the growl of idling jet engines and manmade structures cut through historical space. The instincts of animals far outlive the idealism of humans. 

“Poor thing,” she murmurs. 

Miles away from the airport terminal Sasuke and Sakura are waiting in, their friends cluster behind the bar and struggle, mired in knowledge for which they’ve not asked. Ino and Shikamaru are bickering over the veracity of the parts of the conversation overhead last night and if they should be intervening with any of it. The latter feels a strong tug toward what he considers duty but, if the former knows anything about her childhood, it’s that it’s a veneer to obfuscate exactly what their parents spend their days doing in “service of the government.” Ino knows Shikamaru’s no idiot, and that he knows what opening this up really means.

“We don’t know much of anything, really. This all happened when we were kids.” Arms folded, she’s resolute. Shikamaru mirrors her stance, albeit leaning with his hip on the bar and eyes casting left to right in an endless loop, turning things over in his mind. Ino can almost hear the crackle and spark of his brain working in overdrive.

Peering at him with sharp eyes, she adds, “We can’t prove anything, it’s all hearsay. And I trust Sakura.”

Shikamaru’s brows furrow. “Can’t prove anything yet. But knowing what we know now, do you think them confronting a murderer and criminal is a smart move?”

Ino throws her hands up, a familiar gesture he finds obnoxious on many but doesn’t quite mind on her; there’s no doubt it reminds him of other women in his life, his mother too. He supposes it’s simply his lot. 

“No, of course not! But she’s been taking care of herself for a long time. If her judgment, or her gut, or whatever is driving her brings her there, then it does. Don’t knock intuition.”

“It has its place,” Shikamaru says with a shrug, “but I’m looking at facts, here. And don’t you think they’re . . .”

Wishing he could reel it back as Ino narrows her eyes at him. “What?”

A long pause. Marching up to trap him against the bar, to pressure him, she’s uncomfortably close. 

“What are you trying to say?”

“What will she do to Sasuke,” Shikamaru asks quietly, “when she’s finished with him?”

Ino’s lips go thin. “I warned him, you know. I made it clear. And we’re assuming the worst.” 

“Do you trust her to leave the people she cares about intact?”

“This happened _to_ her, Shikamaru, not because of her.” Perhaps unconsciously, she bares a bit of teeth, bark and bite in defense. 

“Oi, this isn’t blame,” he responds, palms up to keep space between them; she looks like she might knock him out. “But he’s our friend, like she’s yours. And if we’re all about to dig up ancient history, make a mess — we need to make a plan.”

“Shikamaru,” Naruto says, “quit it. Nothing’s gonna happen.”

Shikamaru frowns at his painful, thickheaded optimism. Still, Naruto occupies the place of a childhood friend and feels that he’ll have to defer. 

There’s something in Naruto’s eyes that gives him doubt, catching the edge of it as his friend turns away with his phone in his hand.

Down the hallway toward the back office, half in the dark. After several rings he hears Sasuke on the other end, answering in his usual tone of put-upon, lofty irritation that he’s never lost.

“What, Naruto? We’re boarding soon.”

“Yeah, I know.”

A skip, a half-second pause.

“Did she tell you—”

“We’re friends too, yaknow,” Naruto says. “You’re not the only one she cares about.” Trying to lighten the mood, he adds, “You can’t be great conversation!”

Sasuke doesn’t respond. There’s noise in the background, names called over intercoms and the shuffle of bodies in motion, calls from the agents at gates, murmurs of humanity. A moment in which Naruto hears Sakura’s voice lilting, rising at the end of what sounds like a question, and the way his tone changes when he responds to her and her alone gives him insight he couldn’t identify as such, but it seems to feel right, make sense.

“Listen,” Naruto says, “I’ll only ask you this stuff one time. Do you know anything about my parents dying that you never told me?”

The seconds in between from anyone else would be hesitation. Knowing his measured mannerism as he does, he waits for his words.

“No. There’s nothing I _know_. It’s something I—”

“Don’t say shit you don’t know for sure, then!”

“It’s a feeling. What if—”

“Nah, we talked about ‘what if’s. We don’t do those.” And Naruto’s right, they don’t, part of the pacts they agreed upon in the beginning and as they left the past behind vowing to look only into the sun, never back into the dark. “I don’t want to hear it. I’ve moved on and don’t want to know.”

A loud sound, heavy, causing muffled cries and curses to come down the line. 

Sakura’s voice again, quiet. Probably sitting right next to him in the terminal.

“What was that?”

“A bird hitting the window.”

“What kind?”

Naruto can _hear_ Sasuke rolling his eyes. “And how would I know that?”

Shrugging in the hallway in the dark, as if he can see him. As if he’s there. 

“Are you sure she’s what you want, Sasuke?”

“Naruto.”

Saying his name is a warning shot across the gulf, the no man’s land of an unwritten future. 

“And are you gonna be okay if . . . she doesn’t stay?”

Naruto’s unable to channel those poetics, the words to express what he’s worried about: That they’ve lost so much already and often only have one another to lean on and he’s seen it, he’s _lived_ Sasuke’s low points and they’re much more destructive and wild than his own. Manic fury paired with a coldness, an aloofness, a tandem friendship that somehow works but when his friend’s chains come off unchecked, it’s a toss-up between anger and despair. 

His friends are his everything. 

_We’ll be back soon, Naruto!_ Sakura’s voice makes his chest burn as it comes through the receiver; he imagines her, green eyes bright and smile radiant and his heart slips a little at the thought of her departing somewhere in the wind, leaving a void. 

The words come out and he knows they’re too much as they leave his mouth: 

“You love her, don’t you?”

Sasuke’s response to this, of course, is to simply disconnect the call.

  
  


Settling in the roomy business class seat, Sakura folds her arms and determinedly stares out the window in the ineffectual way of hiding a pout. 

“What did I say about this?”

“This is not a gift. This is how people fly, Sakura.”

“This isn’t how average people fly,” she whispers. Giving him a significant expression, her eyes flicker to the two attendants still making kind and perfunctory greetings to each embarking passenger and party. 

She grumbles something that sounds like _ostentatious;_ smirking at her so specific choice of word, he catches the eye of one of them to seemingly, easily, summon service. Sakura continues to face away from him and watch the tarmac, the sky beyond, until Sasuke extends a steaming cup of coffee to her, hovering under her nose. 

“Real china, but it tastes terrible. Now you can feel like everyone else.”

Pursing her lips, she takes the proffered drink anyway and struggles not to smile. 

“Uchiha Sasuke, I think you’re teasing me.”

Burying the dread at what they’re departing to do, Sasuke gently brushes hair behind her ear, watching her sparkling eyes track planes and birds and endless sky. She hums with caffeine and the clean, bright gloss of novelty — 

while he turns something over and over in his mind, unbidden and morbid in the context of this. 

Thinking of the way it sounds, _Uchiha Sakura,_

while two attendants communicate in the hushed tones of people who have long perfected the art of passing information in disguised ciphers among charmed circles, always directly under the noses of those they serve. 

At 30,000 feet:

Sakura naps, head dropping onto Sasuke’s shoulder as he tries in vain to shake off the thoughts that have taken ahold of his mind and it’s all Naruto’s fault, isn’t it always him and his irritating sunny optimism giving him wayward and indulgent ideas but now it’s difficult to pretend he wouldn’t give this girl anything she wanted and slip a ring on her finger to take his name but gods he’s fucking cursed, isn’t he, what a ridiculous notion to entertain; 

thousands of miles away Itachi is informed of an unexpected visitor that, when he’s told the name, he immediately refuses with a snarl so unlike him that Kisame watches him closely in hope of glimpsing the darkness, the rumors that have always shrouded him and the stories and make it difficult to parse the villain from the man;

in the city recently departed a phone call is made to the chief of police arriving by way of a terrified young woman on the waitstaff of the venue which recently held a grand event, shaking in terror as she relayed it to her supervisor and it made its way up to the office of the hotel’s owner, who carefully reports the body located and crushed into a fourth floor dumbwaiter; 

on a balcony that has to be shaking with their laughter and jubilance of what, exactly, they don’t know, simply being in company better than they thought possible, Naruto kisses Ino in a fumbling and graceless way that probably feels desperate to a gorgeous girl like her and he knows he’s absolutely fucked this up until her tongue meets his and this is fire, _this_ is what melting is and if this is even a fraction of what love is, he can see just how easy it is to drown in something transient and divine — he can understand Sasuke more than he ever thought possible.

Somewhere else, wheels touch tarmac, and Sasuke and Sakura disembark.

There’s one internet blogger tailing them when they reach the rental car counter, three by the time they get on the road, and a gaggle of them plus a few “respectable” individuals ones who’d consider themselves _actual journalists_ as they arrive at the hotel valet.

Forced to make a choice a couple hours later, because they’re not quite sure who’s more interesting lately: The wayward sibling of a murderer estranged from the rest of the Uchiha, or the seemingly unexceptional woman increasingly seen at his side.

Sasuke begins the drive to the urban outskirts toward the prison.

Sakura wanders unfamiliar sidewalks in search for a better cup of coffee.

Sasuke’s brought into the visiting area first, led across a frigid floor flanked by enormous men with hard faces to a tiny table in a garden of many, small metal caps arrayed as patterns and locked resolutely into the floor. It’s mostly because of his late father’s prestige that he’s able to face his brother without a sheet of glass in between — any reasonable visit to a familial murderer with so many desert years in between should really warrant maximum security. 

He feels eyes on him, glances. Even, incredulously, a low whistle. 

“No raised voices,” one of the guards says, indicating a cold plastic seat. Sasuke hesitates before obliging, adopting a rigid posture because everything is exactly as cold as it looks. “And no touching.”

He reflects on the absurdity of that, but a pang of guilt rests under his rib as he takes surreptitious glances at the small groups around him, at other tables. Mothers with trembles in their voices face sons with long sentences and little chances; a young woman carefully grasps the tiny fingers across the table of who by the looks of it could only be her infant on her visitor’s lap, eyeing the guard sidelong to avoid a reprimand. 

But, thinking of Sakura, the truth of it slides home as a key to a heavy lock. The only touching he can imagine here is beating him black and blue.

At the music of chains he looks up and how does he _know_ it’s him, and for a moment his nervous system scatters searching for emotions and reactions that make sense. A jolt dancing down his spine twisting and snuffing into a numbness that washes out the feeling of the dank air, the cold plastic seat beneath him, the existence of his own body in this space. 

Even in an ugly, garish jumpsuit he turns heads. There’s something handsome about him in a different way, a delicate thing. Perhaps they’ve lapsed on enforcing close-cut hair, because second to himself, Uchiha Itachi glides through life after homicide with clean locks and long eyelashes and a fragility to him like the bones of birds, but still utterly and absurdly handsome.

And alive.

What horrors do the deep lines under his eyes hold? Sasuke swears his brother’s had them his whole life. He meets his eyes and it almost overwhelms him as time slows in the guards’ approach: The stitch in his chest, the pain in the memories. 

And rage. Glorious, clean rage like the honed edge of a knife.

Always with a cool affect — it’s never left Itachi, placid as a pond, even as he’s steered to the seat across from Sasuke and his ankles are locked into place underneath the table, his hands left free with a warning glance and small incline of the head that Itachi returns to the guard in kind. 

A ripple of heat, and it manifests as a sneer, the notion that he has a cordial relationship with his keepers. 

A pause. Sasuke’s trying to figure out how to speak without spitting or cursing when Itachi asks,

“So what have you been doing with my letters?”

Eyes wide, Sasuke imagines slamming his face into the metal table. It’s so like him to be detached, everything beneath his notice.

“I didn’t read them. Not a single one,” he says through gritted teeth.

Itachi nods, folding his arms across his chest. 

“Did you burn them?” 

— _how does he ?! —_

“Oh, Sasuke, you always were so dramatic.”

Irritated, taken aback, Sasuke marshals his thoughts because he has to take control of this conversation, except everything’s tipping sideways and he’s scrambling to pick up his own pieces because he’s depressingly out of his league.

“How did you find out where to write me? My phone number?” Sasuke demands.

“Prisoners and police alike are familiar with the name Uchiha. I’m not so unlikeable to others, in a place like this. People are willing to do favors.”

Sasuke glowers at him: His hair, his rings, the polish on his nails.

“You’ve ended up looking much more like our mother—”

“Shut up,” Sasuke hisses. “Shut the fuck up.”

“It’s likely better that way. Perhaps the people you meet don’t easily connect you and I.” 

Steepling his fingers, a ring catches the stripped and blue-tone lights above. The perks of good behavior in a life sentence. “Mother was the least culpable.”

“Don’t — don’t talk about her!”

Itachi studies his nails, black-painted. His knuckles. Fixes his little brother with a piercing stare.

“Then what are you here to discuss, after so many years of ignoring me?”

“All of it,” Sasuke says. His voice sounds far away, an echo from another layered void in space. “I want the truth. Why you killed them, why you ran and then turned yourself in, why you—” he loses the thread for a moment, swallowing, throat dry, “—left me alive.”

Itachi’s expression doesn’t change. “That’s all?” 

“What do you mean that’s all?” Sasuke hears his voice, he’s snarling, he’s emotional. This isn’t how he wanted to handle this. “That’s not enough for you? The fact that I’m here in front of you, speaking to you at all after what you’ve done — monster. You—”

“Tell me, little brother, where is she?”

Sasuke’s yanking Itachi by the neck of his jumpsuit and the rebuke crackles in the space, swift and harsh. “No touching!”

Sasuke’s head whips ‘round to stare at the guard; Itachi lets himself be handled, impassive.

He throws his brother back across the table.

“You don’t get to say her name. Those are my questions; I deserve that.”

“You don’t own her, Sasuke. I’m sure you can barely handle her.” 

The truth of that cuts deeply, earning no response. Sasuke parries: 

“I want to know _why_.” Sasuke grips the sides of his chair to hide his shaking hands. Focus. Control. “You ruined our lives and the _least_ ,” his hands and knuckles sparkle with pain, “you can do is explain yourself after all these years.”

Itachi inhales, exhales slowly. “We could start over from this moment, little brother. The narrative could go forward from this, unencumbered by our family’s sins.”

The only response Sasuke has for this is another angry curse. 

“Ah, you have no grace. No pretense.” 

There’s a moment, a flicker of something Sasuke finds impossible in the expression of a man like this. 

It might have been a glimmer of regret.

_“You’re quite brash, for a little girl. No sense of self-preservation, no pretense.”_

_She raises her chin and in a moment, her eyes have the steely glint and shadow of something alien, something sanctified, terrifying._

_“Don’t you call me a little girl.”_

“Was this her idea?” Itachi’s voice is quiet, serious. 

Sasuke leans forward, elbows on the cold table, shaking with rage. Patrician slope of his nose millimeters away from a regal one of the same, the bloodline curse close and crackling between the two of them.

“Mine. All mine,” Sasuke says, teeth bared. “Now talk.”

Settling back into his chair, he swallows hard and folds his arms, waiting.

“The details aren’t important,” Itachi says slowly. Sasuke opens his mouth, and Itachi raises a hand to bring him to silence. Chafing but interested, he obeys. “By the time it all came to that point, it was the only solution to so many years of the—” Itachi’s lips go thin, and his eyes flash while the rest comes out in staccato bursts that seem to alter the composition of his face, make him ugly, “the illegality, the killing, the _secrets_. The only method by which we could stop this curse, generations of machinations.”

Scraping his nails against the metal table between them, he manages to speak without moving his lips: “A tree diseased needs to be taken out by the roots.”

“Don’t lie,” Sasuke sneers. “You were brought into the fold young, you were such a good son, so smart.”

“You can’t think I wanted any of it. And I took all that knowledge on to protect you, hoping to find a way to maneuver you out of the spotlight, away from the hands of our family members. This goes beyond our parents, little brother. This is a family of lies, a dark deck of cards.”

“So they, what, had some sketchy financial deals? Legal issues? Was it really so bad you had to kill them in cold blood?”

Staring at his palms, Itachi sounds so far away when he says, “They asked me to, Sasuke. It was their only way out.”

The silence, it rings. Stunning in its message.

“You don’t seriously expect me to believe that? They asked you to do it, to be _killed_ , to ruin everything and leave us behind? Leave—” _Leave me._

“Better my hands than those that were coming for them. Sasuke!” Itachi taps sharply on the table, pulling his focus. “The more I tell you, the more danger I put you in. Both of you.”

“Don’t talk about her,” Sasuke hisses. “Unless you’re going to tell me what the _fuck_ you thought you were doing, getting her caught up in your mess.”

“The family’s grip was tightening on them, our parents,” Itachi says, ignoring him. “The more the branches grow, the more out of the trunk’s control it gets. There were far-flung factions forming that no one could control, and they were slipping up. Things that we would never endorse. Messy murders. Trafficking rings. Financial aberrations, millions disappearing, leaving trails. Family business runs amok and turns into common street crime with too many ways to trace it back.”

“If this is even true, any of it,” Sasuke says, “why wouldn’t they stop? Convene the family, handle the rogues? They weren’t stupid, and neither are you.” Pauses. “So why did you—”

Itachi parries again — _not her, not now._ “Control didn’t rest with them anymore. The new operating arm shifted out of our influence into another’s, and we became a sideshow. True, it did not look that way; in the eyes of the media, we were as notorious and powerful as ever. But in the wake of Madara’s passing—”

“Grandfather?”

“Great-grandfather,” he corrects. “he left reigning stakeholder power to his young adoptee. His favorite, but . . .”

Trailing off, Itachi’s gaze slips somewhere else, a familiar expression or lack thereof so familiar to Sasuke, the one that makes him look slightly unhinged and always prompts shivers, wondering at the crazy lurking in his own genetics. 

“It threw everything into chaos,” he said, low and slow. “It became unsustainable.” 

“And you told me nothing!” Sasuke leans forward again, staring him in the eyes. “Meanwhile I was getting kicked under Father’s feet like a dog, when I wasn’t getting ignored.”

“You were a child.” His brother’s voice is narrow, cold as the table and the floor and the air. “What could you have done? Things were dire, and I had to work to make moves against Madara and his charge.”

“Then why did you tell her?” And now Sasuke’s eyes are alight with that rage, that ragged edge of a flame dancing at the edge of particularly flammable debris, dry as bone. “Why did you recruit a girl to help you cause an accident? To help you commit murder?” Closer, closer. “What did you do to her?

“Sasuke—”

“Just how sick are you, Itachi? Going to marry her in so she couldn’t talk, because you knew she—” but he can’t say it, it’s sitting in his throat in a knot but he’ll gag if he tries to articulate it, “she would have done it for you.”

“It was a mistake,” Itachi says. “I admit I made several. And yes,” he adds, drawing his attention again, “in the beginning, the intent was to use her for our own ends. It was a directive that came from the new order, and I intended to carry that out to keep up appearances.”

“Oh, what then,” Sasuke spits. “you started to feel something for her?”

“It wasn’t like that. If you know one thing — it was not like that.”

Sasuke’s shaking, eyes glittering. “Then what was it?”

But how can Itachi explain? That she cut to the core of him and laid all his faults on display; that a force much stronger than him channeled through her and took him to task; that somehow in the moment he’d first laid eyes on her and she stared back with the unnerving green eyes of an inalienable being from another space and time, he’d known they would not be able to use her easily as hoped but he had orders to follow.

They’d chosen wrong, and possibly had been the catalyst for her, for this.

That if he blinked into his future he didn’t think he’d make it out of her orbit alive. 

“I admired her intelligence, her strong sense of justice. The type of person that felt so incompatible with a family like ours, everything we stood for. Everything we were doing. Perhaps I thought . . .”

_that she could be protected, that she could_

_change what we were, with her connection to something divine, that she could_

_repair something in me._

“By the time I wanted to bring it all down, felt trapped and unsure of how to extricate our family from this, I felt she needed protection. She had been drawn in too deeply by then. As I said, it was a mistake.” 

“And she didn’t—” Sasuke breaks off, eyes searching Itachi’s with an almost demented gleam, “she didn’t ask you to do what you did.”

Itachi surveys him with an expression of dismay, uncertainty. Where has he seen those eyes before, teetering on the edge of obsession? He wonders if this is jealousy over a being he never had an option to possess; he’s not sure anyone can, the way she is, the damage their interference caused. His intrusion in her life has changed a fated trajectory — possibly, though, it was always her lot and how long does that clock have left? 

_Oh, do you love her?_

“Ask her to come here. Tomorrow.” 

“No.”

“I’m sure she’d remind you it’s not your decision.”

The guard and Itachi share a curt nod, and he comes forward while reaching into his pocket for the keys to release his ankles. Sasuke’s shaking again in anger and disbelief at being shut down so easily. 

Itachi's face is unreadable. “Unless I speak to her, there’s no more to say.”

And he’s indicating he wants to be done, to leave, the previously-considered keepers more like aides to a king as they move at his behest. 

“Why her?”

Still with that impassive face against Sasuke's outburst, he holds up a pale hand and stays the guards, speaking quietly. 

“Because it’s the way of things. A girl with average parents, no extended family, no connections, producing an incredibly intelligent girl with dreams much bigger than she understood? From a small, dusty town where deep, dark secrets are kept all the time? If she happened to disappear on the way home on her long, lonely bus ride in the dark — well, she was often alone, too smart for her own good, young and beautiful, and that’s simply what the world does.” 

In a sliver of a moment, the flicker of Itachi’s haunted eyes conveys some type of apology.

“Snatches poor small-town daughters and eats them all alive.”

Tendrils of smoke coil against the glittering parapet of glass — the light is dim. With the back of her dress so low and yearning for the tailbone, shadows dancing among the bones and sinew, an outsider could consider the view as a painting, an exquisite and alien representation of a woman rendered real.

It’s not her cigarette, but there’s an illicit speakeasy mood in the hotel bar tonight, and if not there, where? If not now, when? 

Sakura and the bartender politely ignore it, each dwelling in one’s own orbit.

One gimlet down and another waiting for her lips. Imbibing in hotel bars, at least, is acceptable to partake in alone. 

“There’s no way, hm,” a man says, “that you’re here alone.”

A stranger takes the open seat next to her without asking, sizing her up with gleaming blue eyes. Sakura glances at him out of the corner of her eye and notes his appearance, soft, and how uncannily he reminds her of Ino. 

“After all, you’re the prettiest one in here — besides myself, of course.”

This time, she can’t keep silent. “So humble. You really do remind me of someone I know.”

“That better be a good thing.” He smiles easy, but with an impetuous edge. The familiar type of peacocking that some men being ignored shift into a bit too quickly.

Sakura’s eyes stay on the glittering glass castle of bottles behind the bar, loftily sifting through the words on the labels with the idleness of choosing among fruits in a market. 

Taking the measure of his intensity.

“So who are you with tonight? C’mon.”

Sakura takes a sip of her gimlet. Stares straight ahead. “Nobody.”

“That’s good then, hm? ‘Cause neither am I.”

He waits for her to take the bait, but he’s left dangling.

“The way you’ve been sitting here, the whole scene, yeah, it’s like a painting. And you’re the center of it.” He holds up his hands, fingers touching fingers to mimic looking at her through a viewfinder. “It’s a perfect thing, really.”

She glances at him, taking in his dark eyeliner and relaxed, open body language. Swagger. She resists the urge to punch him straight off the stool he seems to be balancing on. 

“Hm,” she voices, noncommittal, bored.

“Listen,” and now he sounds harsh, irritated, “I just think you and I could—”

“Who do you think I am?” she asks, finally turning to face him, lips tight. “A lonely woman of the night? Someone’s wife? Stupid? Get out of here.”

“Whoa, lady, that isn’t what I was—”

“Is he interrupting your evening?”

Sakura and the stranger both turn to Sasuke, who turns eyes on the latter with intense dislike.

“Hm, listen, the girl and I are just having a conversation.”

“You’re talking at her, and she wants you to get lost.”

Sakura sets her glass sharply on the wooden bar, the sound an admonition. “I’m able to handle this myself, thank you.”

But she smiles. Any excellent observer can see that she greets Sasuke as a flame consumes a match, as something feral devours their own young.

As a man walks into water and drowns.

“Listen,” the stranger says, sitting up a little straight, chest swelling a bit wider, “I got here first.” Eyeing Sasuke’s appearance — hair windswept from outside, leather jacket dotted with pinpricks of rain — he adds, “Punk.”

Sakura shifts her shoulder and faces the bar again, away from both of them; long pink locks cascade over her skin which catches, in certain errant bits of light, the glitter of yesteryear. 

“This isn’t your watering hole, or a desert.” Her dismissal is curt. “I’m not interested.” 

But she glances over her shoulder to meet the dark eyes of a stranger slightly less so now, his eyes reading the ancient runes in each knob in her spine, framed by the open back of her black dress.

“What the fuck — but it actually is. It’s a bar! That’s what you _call_ — hm, you know what—” The blonde ends his stuttering parade by tossing bills on the bar and looking like he might spit. He seems to want to say more, though whether it’s the dangerous energy coming from Sasuke or the absolute disinterest of the woman he’s just tried to pick up, he sneers at them both as he sweeps away with a vanity that, admittedly, is still charming on him.

Sasuke takes the vacated seat and shakes his head at the bartender, instead taking up the same behavior and watching Sakura in profile.

“Frostier than I’ve seen you,” he says quietly.

Taking another delicate sip, she narrows her eyes. “He has something weird about him.”

“Do you think he’s a leftover journalist — looking for an angle?”

“Not that type of weird,” she says. Smiling to herself, she continues. “And anyway, you’ll be happy to know that most of them were apparently enamoured with following me around town.”

Before he thinks about it, he’s brushing the pink sweep of hair off her shoulder,

and her stomach swoops, the heat of him causing fever and spins.

“How was . . . ?” She doesn’t finish, in part because it’s difficult to discuss aloud and eyes feel everywhere and in a little, in part, because she’s breathless as his hand lands on her thigh.

He ignores the unspoken question, and can’t ask her his own. Not now, not with her looking like this, spots of pink high in her cheeks and legs for days and a little threatening, a poison fatal to drink that he’d imbibe without complaint. 

“This is new,” he says in her ear, slipping a finger underneath the hem against her thigh. 

“Paparazzi are sated easily. Pretty girl buying pretty things. Sweets and—” her breath hitches “— dresses, soft and feminine.”

Sasuke hums some noise of amusement so close, too close, 

and here she is, melting, all honey and spice.

“Thank you,” he whispers, “for distracting them,”

and all of her aches.

He doesn’t thank her for distracting him too, but she knows. 

It’s in the way they kiss in the elevator, the more gentle manner, tonight, they whisper and beg, _please, oh gods, please,_ the way they only make it as far as some tiny supply closet left unlocked, tender with one another as if they are truly only sand and dust, as if this is their last time around the sun.  
  
  


Several miles away there’s a woman’s body in an alley,

a hole blown through the side of her face,

odd crescent moons in humanoid bite marks all over the skin,

and nobody finds it until morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Opening lyrics: Warm Me Up by The Audition  
> Also I geeked out and made a playlist; it's dynamic and I add to it as I write: [Sirens [AU] Spotify Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3bfpEkt00vMFkzyZI27jMi)
> 
> Twitter: [@psallocappella](https://twitter.com/psalloacappella)
> 
> As always I am grateful for the responses I've already received and love hearing from ya'll


	12. XII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Where do you have to be?”
> 
> She turns to him, the afternoon sun caroming across the floor, waltzing with the curved terminal glass and transforming her jade eyes into jewels. As if they weren’t already.
> 
> “I guess nowhere, after all. You’re the closest thing to home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> why'd you have to go and make things so complicated

**XII.**

_I set fires so deliberately,  
_ _'Til I taste the smoke on every part of me_

❦

The truth trickles out in low whispers sometime between the dismal twilight and impending sunrise. Hushed in the room, dark sans a dazzling strip of urban light beaming from a gap in the curtains, slivering the bed between them.

The city fails to sleep, and so do they.

Sakura listens, mostly, eyes meandering over his tousled hair and the lines of his beautiful chest. Wrinkles form in the center of her forehead as Sasuke relays what she assumes is the important ninety percent, holding back the personal and difficult remainder whatever it may be. 

The urge to take him into her arms, press her lips to the deep dark shadows under his eyes. 

“An adoptee,” she repeats. “For a family like yours it seems . . . unusual.”

As always, she susses out and articulates unvoiced things so easily. 

“But if your — great-grandfather, you said? — was aiming to shift your family’s power dynamic, he had a protégé to do it with. Of course, that means others end up on the outs. Your parents.”

Sasuke nods; her voice sharpens, winnowing as the edge of a blade. He watches her eyes and the way she touches her lips with an absentmindedness, and he’s reminded of Shikamaru, who adopts a similar mien when lost in thought. Gears turning, pieces moving in some seminal slow game of discovery.

She emerges from her reverie, realizing he’s staring. With a soft expression, she threads her fingers through his hair and says, “Quite a long, long game to be playing.”

“He said they asked him to do it. ‘Better my hands than those that were coming for them.’”

Sakura drinks him in, sympathetic but still redolent, edacious. If she didn’t already believe she’s a woman cursed, there has to be a punishment for violating a sacrosanct aspect of pillow talk in which you didn’t ogle a man as they discussed their dead parents. 

“He said the plan to marry you was a mistake.” Sasuke’s tone floats to Sakura’s ears buoyed by skepticism.

“Maybe it was.” Sakura shrugs. “I was a nobody; it could have been any precocious young girl. Any desperate one, or one who crossed their path at the right time and filled a need.”

“It’s sick,” Sasuke hisses.

“From their perspective,” she sighs, trailing the gentle pads of fingers over his ear, “it’s practical. Who would believe it, really? A middle schooler, some prodigy among commons? And even if someone did, she’s not of age — can she be blamed? If she disappears, it’s just another little girl from a little town.”

“You speak about it as if it’s not you.”

“It often feels like someone else. Another lifetime.”

What he says next sends her heartbeat spiraling.

“He wants to speak with you.”

She knows it was coming, feels it in her bones. Love and lunacy are leading with strings of fate weaving tapestries as the backdrop to the rest. It doesn’t matter if the entanglement in one another’s lives is a goddess’s errant whim or carefully plotted chess. 

But can he walk through fire? Men turn to ash in her wake, and she slips away to ease them through the spell and dependence, aching for a person they aren’t sure existed.

“Then I guess we’ll have a conversation.”

“He’s leveraging you to manage information, to get to me.”

“Yes,” she agrees, shrugging. “That’s what powerful men do.” _And you will too, when you need to_. “Seems like it has to be done.”

“Can you—”

“Don’t ask me if I can handle it.” 

What can he see in her eyes that entrances him; the sense of starving, fear? As if her curse is laid bare and he’s trailed her highlight reel, all the mistakes and shifting identities in small towns, the odd jobs in even odder places, thin and flimsy promises made to men and women under names she’s discarded until she’s nothing but a breeze.

It always finds her. 

“I’ll be there,” Sasuke says sharply. “He’s in chains. Nothing will happen to you, and you leave when you want.”

“I’ll play his game, Sasuke.” She realizes she adores him in all ways but especially like this, fierce and watchful and ultimately managing to keep up with her, in all her tides, all the phases of the moon. “You can’t give up knowing the truth just to spare my emotions.”

Her skin burns underneath the gaze of his ink eyes, simmering as temple torches with the weight of endless decades. As if he’s known her for dynasties, not days.

“What are you thinking, when you look at me like that?” she asks.

This facet of their family’s men, dark eyes always dancing on the razor’s edge of danger. Intensity, obscurity. What soothes her from the rattle and shake in her own bones is the reassuring knowledge that he still has a difficult time deciphering her. _For now, anyway,_ she muses. 

“You make him uncomfortable.” Lacking that couching tone, that tact; he never does compare her eyes to stars or compose metered poems. She suspects there’s something that draws him in, but there’s never been a man or woman she could ask, and how would that sound? Narcissistic at best, demented at worst: Are you seeing your demise or hearing siren songs? What’s the orchestra playing to the backdrop of this love? 

_Love._ She purses her lips at her mind’s easy usage. It slips as silk, without resistance. 

“Nobody bothers Itachi, and no one makes him stumble. It’s why he was probably chosen aside from being the eldest. He was born for the role he was put into. Words like ‘destined’ come to mind, even though that’s proven by absolutely nothing at all.” And here Sasuke’s face is a little more shadowed, a twitch passing from one side to the other. “Except for you. You’ve both said, insisted, actually, that none of this has anything to do with him loving you, nor you him. That, I believe.”

He pauses, eyes glittering. In the odd cold gleam, unsettling like nuclear detonation searing the daylight, the thread of his gaze suspends adoration and loathing in a frozen moment. A photo capturing time — a trapped bee preserved in amber.

She holds her breath.

“He said he was following orders, but what made them choose you in the first place? You obviously were not what they expected, naïve but not so compliant.” A trace note of something that might be pride, amusement. “He said he admired you, but it’s almost as if he hated the thought. Confusing behavior for someone who was following what he felt was his role, his burden.” 

“Sasuke—”

“How is it that we’re here, Sakura? First him, then me, all of us intertwined?” His limbs tense, rigid, an animal in wait. 

She chooses her next words gingerly, stepping around unseen landmines. “This starts with the selected heir, the adoptee. Maybe this is something I can ask Itachi tomorrow, get his name. I assume, as so much of this business seems to be done in this family, orders weren’t discussed blithely over tea.”

“What am I missing?”

“What do you want me to say?” She feels weak in front of him, naked, so different from the way he’s seen her already. There’s skin and then there’s _soul_. “Ino told you, I’m sure — I’m cursed in this life, I always run. People get entangled and then I leave them behind.”

“Curses aren’t real,” he says. Harsh, but even as it leaves his lips her bright eyes lock on him.

She scoffs, watching him closely. “I don’t think you believe that.”

She’s right, of course, knows she’s hit the mark for them both. Two long and winding strings of separate fates now braided and knit, the curse of his family name and her burden even without one to claim.

Gentle nails trailing on his bare chest. “I’m a stranger to you.”

“Can you really still say that, Sakura?”

“I mean it, I’m dangerous. It — this — follows me. Calamity. It sounds stupid, I know, but you have to believe me.”

“Isn’t _science_ your wheelhouse? Biochemicals and psychology, not mythology and drama?” The gentle upturn of the corner of his lips brings her into his orbit all over again. Lately it’s so indulgent, so smooth. 

It startles her, the way he taps her forehead and presses her, sinking, into memories. Another time with another brother, some strange manner in which they convey affection. In her mind’s eye it’s handed down in sanctified ritual with the reverence of a blessed object. 

Hard to suppress the thought that the Uchiha are simply fucking weird. 

_Ino thrusts a ribbon at her and nods sharply, indicating the hair hiding her forehead._

_“Here, tie it back. If you don’t, the other girls will make fun of you, and the teachers will think you’re dim.”_

He brings her back with his question. “As for this life, it's the only one you’re sure of, right?”

“And what if I don’t want to be saved?” 

“I want you,” he growls, “in any form that takes.”

_‘you are no god; you are something stronger than a god if that can be’_

As if he hears the recitation in her thoughts, he gently takes her chin to direct her gaze. Holding her fast.

Sasuke says it against her lips:

“Choosing you was a mistake.”

She’s unsure what he means, but he’s kissing her like a man desperate and she’s returning it in ardent madness. 

She laughs softly and smiles into his lips at the notion of choices. 

_I love_

_and I leave_

_and I love._

They depart on the heels of a cold and quiet dawn, the whispers to the valet for the car, coffee, and paper lost in the rustle and handover of each.

Sunglasses hide tired eyes, a contrite disguise. Too lost in thought and one another, and perhaps if they’d read the paper, they’d have noticed the dead girl on the third page. 

❦

Deciding to present a united front together seems like the most reasonable idea at first, until of course Uchiha Itachi walks in, beautiful in a way that’s disassociating and fragile. 

Flanked again by guards showing a particular familiarity with their precious cargo, Sakura’s still unable to prepare fully for the encounter despite him avoiding her eyes directly. It’s almost certainly on purpose. Sasuke’s sneer surfaces, an involuntary reaction, animals circling around coveted territory. 

How loud the chains sound in her ears, clattering and singing as the murderer’s ankles are bolted into the floor. Itachi glancing between the two and managing, not once, to truly look them in the eyes. 

An uncomfortable moment reels with the poignancy of a crafted film scene: The gentle scraping and pitch of metal chains as prisoners shift at their tables while a handsome criminal threads his fingers together and sets them on the cold table between them. Guards shuffling, clearing their throats. Crying, from someone, but in deference no one turns to seek the source. 

Sakura doesn’t realize she’s holding her breath until Itachi breaks the silence.

“I’d like to speak with her alone.”

She wonders if the politeness is for her benefit, lulling her into a sense of security. Always how she remembers him, a thin layer of arrogance as glass to keep others from even leaving fingerprints. 

“You think I’m going to leave her here alone with a—”

“It’s all right,” Sakura hears herself saying. “There’s nothing he can do, in chains, with guards.” Something possesses her to touch Sasuke’s hand under the table in a gesture intended to demur. 

Does she imagine the flicker in Itachi’s eyes? 

Sasuke’s jaw rolls and tightens, but her logic wins out. He leaves in a haughty huff, though not without trailing his hand across the small of her back in a lingering way that leaves the heat of his anger.

It’s another discomfiting 30 seconds before it finally begins.

“You look the same, really,” Itachi says. “Young, clever eyes. Sweet.”

Sakura doesn’t answer, embodying water, channeling placid pond surfaces. Uchihas speak with eyes, and if he won’t deign to play, neither will she.

“Well, perhaps not. I see a shadow in them too. Left by us.”

Sakura makes a blithe noise, acting disinterested. Her eyes are on his fingers: Heavy rings, nails painted black. 

“I’m sure you have things to say. Questions for me as well.”

“Seems that you’re having an interesting time in prison,” she says tartly, now eyeing his long hair. 

“You know something about becoming another person. Quite a lot, actually. Though you also know that it always manages to catch up with you.”

“Prison, for most,” she interjects, “isn’t some journey to reinvent yourself.”

“Contrary, it’s necessary if you want to survive, Sakura.”

There it is, the way her name from his lips tumbles down each bone in her spine. Freefall. 

Unlacing his fingers, he holds his hands up to show her his palms. It invokes prophesy and her mother’s neurosis. 

There’s nothing less hilarious when he says, “And funny, I feel freer than I ever did.”

“Why do you want to speak with me?” 

“Ah,” is all he says. Lacing his fingers together again, the whites of his knuckles seem almost grey. She wonders if this is what prison does, bleeds the color from the soul. If fading is the only way to make it through.

His gaze lingers somewhere on her collarbone, never wanting to look her in the eyes. _You make him uncomfortable._

“Why do you never look at me?”

“My brother’s in love with you, but I’m sure you know.”

“Stop sidestepping me,” she hisses.

She hears a stronger voice threading within hers, cutting, deific. By the way Itachi shifts in his seat, she knows in that moment he hears it too.

Her, but not. An inner layer, occupying the space among atoms and skin. In grounding her life in science, she’s never managed to shake the feeling that things exist beyond daily understanding. 

“But we both know that you don’t like to stay. This isn’t to criticize you — I’m not interested in your pledge or plan. You’ll do what you do.”

“Why don’t you ever look at me?” Her voice breaks. “What monster do you see in me, Itachi?”

He recoils at the sound of his name. 

“Is that why I was chosen, because you look at me and see weakness? Or because there’s some evil in me to use?”

“What are you—”

“The adoptee,” she interrupts. “You were following orders, and your family wasn’t in charge by then. A clan full of power struggles and business coups. You watched your father try to change the family and fail, and then it was left to you. But you didn’t end up doing what you were destined to.”

“Or maybe I did.”

“He said to pick me, specifically? Or to use a little girl? Not that it matters now.”

“Choosing you . . . was a mistake.”

She goes rigid, stomach clenching. 

“It was perceived to be for the greater good, a girl who likely would have ended up in a ditch, that we could dispose of without much trouble, could be used for our ends. For the head of the family, it wasn’t much different than the trauma and illegality going on under his nose that he let fester.”

Sakura turns this over, letting it sink in. Another clench and shiver in her stomach, enough to bring her forward to hunch over the table. Visions dance in her head of trafficked girls and indebted fathers shot in alleys, drugs, guns, refineries blown to bits.

“Madness.” It comes out as a whisper, barely voiced. “And so your solution was to marry me, to spare me a passing obituary in a newspaper. Hiding in plain sight. So _generous_ of you.” She glares at him, has the urge to yank him by his lovely hair and force him to look into her eyes. “You’re an idiot.”

That same ripple of silent resistance and rebuke — men who aren’t used to being spoken to this way. 

He parries again. “Do you love him? My little brother?”

“What does this have to do with anything?”

“I’m asking genuinely, as the only family he has left.” Indeed, his eyes soften around the edges, fleeting and gone. 

Sakura bites her lip. “I don’t like to feel those things too deeply. Because of you, all of this, it’s too dangerous.” She places a hand on the table, palm facing down, not too far from where his tight-laced knuckles rest. “I’ve made friends and had to break them, over and over. I’m cursed now, damaged.”

“The curse is ours — you were a casualty.” But of course, he doesn’t apologize.

“How can that be, really?” Sakura sounds like she’s on the edge of a laugh, though a sad one, bitter. “When you look at me the way you do, like you’re scared? It’s not just guilt.”

He pauses before responding, a held breath. “I know only in hindsight that this was a mistake. We had started a fight with something bigger than you and I. Whatever grace has settled onto your shoulders, whatever protects you . . .” 

He trails off, not sure of how to finish a sentence like that. 

“Sasuke can, you know. Even though I think I scare him, make him shy, twist him into knots.” She raises her eyes to Itachi’s, willing him to look one last time. 

“He looks into my eyes, never flinching, and sees me.”

The lines of Itachi’s face twitch, and she sees something settle in his expression. It’s not a smile or serenity, but it’s there.

She continues, quiet. “Did you ever care for me, even a little bit?”

How can he tell her that he’d believed in her divinity, thought it was a salve to repair all of their souls? Especially his? That deep down he’d believed that it could be simple, acts and words are good or evil and intent was all that mattered; that in striving to be one he became the other and donned the cloak in sacrifice?

“It’s as you said, Sakura. How do you let yourself feel too deeply for things you’re bound to lose? Things, by way of fate, strung so far out of your reach?”

What he says is too close, the only crumb she’ll ever receive. Unclear, detached, and so very him. 

“I have a few more questions,” she says thickly, as if she’s struck by a sudden cold. 

Raising his elbows, he rests his chin on his laced knuckles. He nods.

“As long as we leave him time.” Itachi sounds almost amused, and tilts his head surreptitiously to the side to indicate Sasuke glowering through the glass, pacing like a prowling, wounded feline. “He’s sensitive.”

Sakura doesn’t belabor the fact that she thinks it’s just a hallmark Uchiha trait, love and loathing only an atom removed. 

“Can you promise me my parents weren’t killed by your family?”

It’s so abrupt that Itachi clears his throat. He catches a glimpse of her eyes, sharp and cutting. Don’t look too closely; he now knows lesser mortals are devoured, of which he’s one. 

“A condition I pressed for early on was that no one would touch your family. Not my father, not our great-grandfather or his people. No one.”

Purses her lips, though she seems satisfied with the answer.

“What about Naruto’s? What happened to them?”

This is where he tenses, eyes flickering to the glass, to his little brother.

“I assume you know who Sasuke’s best friend is? The Uzumakis?”

“Ah, we knew their family for a long time.”

“Ah,” she repeats. 

“Why would you want to know about this?”

Sakura’s eyes flash at him. “He’s my friend too.” 

Itachi simply doesn’t answer, the silence conveying more than any words can. He tries them anyway. “There’s an official police report.”

Green gaze on the deep, tired lines under his eyes, she lets it lie.

“One last thing,” she says, the tone drawing his attention. Folding her arms across her chest, her fingernails dig into her own skin. 

Itachi watches closely.

“Who is the adoptee, who was given power by your great-grandfather? What’s his name?”

 _So she knows._ He must assume at this point that she knows anything Sasuke’s been told, and their closeness is intriguing, confirms his suspicions. 

“More knowledge can be a liability,” he says slowly. “Safer for both of you if it’s a missing detail.”

“But you know,” she presses. Lowers her chin, a single pink lock of hair falling into her face. 

“He comes to visit, but I’d rather not speak with him. My hand was played after the crime, obviously, my parents preferring to die rather than fall in line.” 

Sakura thinks for a moment. 

“If he comes to visit, then his name is in the computer. Though it’s an old prison, people may still sign in with a visitor’s book.”

Itachi stares, then hisses, “No.”

She reaches for him and he recoils at her touch. Holding a ringed finger of his gently with her thumb and index, she inspects the skin underneath. 

The curved thick line in the outline of a cloud, a shape filled with crimson.

Letting him go, she gets to her feet and brushes long pink locks behind her shoulder, considering him with something like resolve. 

“Uchiha men don’t learn; always trying to tell me ‘no.’”

  
  


Sasuke watches her closely as she comes through the door as though expecting a dramatic change. 

“I’m fine,” she preempts, hair in a curtain to hide her face. “Really. Need a bathroom.”

She shrugs out of his reach, head bowed as she hurries down the hallway. 

Heads turn when Sasuke stomps back to Itachi’s cold table where he’s still waiting, expectant. Taking Sakura’s recently vacated seat, he keeps his hands out of sight as they clench into fists.

“Satisfied?”

His brother says nothing, indicates even less. It’s as if he didn’t hear.

“We’re not staying, by the way,” Sasuke continues. 

“I understand.”

Itachi’s comment throws him off with its unexpected gentleness. It makes him feel guilty, and he hates it. It’s nothing, however, compared to the follow-up.

“I’m glad I was able to face her again.”

Sasuke’s anger ripples, but the longer he sits across from him and the more he learns, the more frayed it becomes. Still: “Shut up.”

“There is something I want to ask you.”

“Didn’t you get plenty of answers?”

“She wouldn’t tell me about this, I’m sure. I am not you.”

Sasuke feels wrong-footed, having a real discussion regarding this woman they both care about, like they’re normal siblings.

“She seems unsettled.”

“Conversations with a murderer, I can’t imagine why.”

Sasuke folds his arms, feeling irritated though also petty. 

“Is there possibly someone from her past that’s bothering her?”

“Yes,” Sasuke says, sneering. “You.”

Itachi’s pensive look sparks the memory of the night Sasuke picked her up from the lounge, a telepathic exchange across a cold metal table. But how would he pick up on that, unless, unless — 

“You!” Without warning Sasuke shoves the chair back and it clatters, drawing eyes and startling other visitors with its sharp sound. 

“Excuse me, sir! ”

Before he can process what he’s doing, his fingers are in Itachi’s collar and he’s fighting to pull him over the surface of the smooth metal table but there’s a heavy sound as his ankles strain against the restraints, reminding them both he’s locked in. Shaking him and pulsing with runaway anger as Itachi struggles to keep an impassive face, free of the concern and realization that’s come to him in this moment.

“Stay away from her!”

“Sasuke—”

“Stop sending your people after her!” he spits, now twisting away from the arms of two security guards who are reluctant to put their hands on him. “You hear me?”

It’s useless to rebut, he knows, much less shout his innocence in this particular situation across a crowded room of criminals and the families hurt by them. Ironic. Ridiculous.

They lead him out gently, steering him rather than strong arming, but he hisses it as if it’s only them, a vicious promise.

“I’ll kill them.” Through gritted teeth, he pledges his hate. “If they touch her, I’ll take care of them myself!” 

Other visitors duck their heads and avert their eyes, pretending not to be enraptured by the drama.

His little brother is not a killer, but Itachi supposes that a man can always be pushed given a perfect storm of circumstances, especially in the hurricane of madness and love — or the space somewhere in between. 

Itachi’s usual guard bends under the table to unlock his ankles, frowning a bit.

“Guess the next visit won’t be for a while.”

Several hours later, Sasuke’s behind the wheel of the car again and both don sunglasses in a fruitless attempt to return to the airport unidentified. The morning’s paper is under Sakura’s feet, forgotten, and they’ve lapsed into another fragile silence.

“Almost there,” she says to no one.

Driving with one hand and the other resting on the center console, Sasuke doesn’t respond. She can almost hear his guilt suffocating the car.

She inhales sharply, exhales on a long string of beats. 

“Before we left, I spoke with one of the wardens. I think he’s familiar with Itachi and he gave me . . . well, wanted me to give you this.”

A card with an address on it, nothing more or less. She holds the heavy card stock between her fingers, finally setting it on her lap.

“He said Itachi writes to you often, and hopes you’ll return his letters. Said that writing might be easier for you, might prefer it. Just like you enjoy the radio.”

The stone silence makes her wonder if she’s offended him, shouldn’t have opened her mouth.

“He never made fun of me for liking old-fashioned things,” Sasuke says quietly. 

One of her knees bounces up and down with chaotic, nervous energy. 

She takes his hand suddenly, weaving her fingers into his. He continues to drive, unfazed.

“Are we on a first date?”

Sakura feels prickling heat in her face, despite herself. Embarrassing. “What do you mean?”

“You’re shaking like you’re nervous.” He would never say it’s funny, but she can hear the amusement, spots his curling lip. “We’ve seen much more of one another than this. Holding hands is tame, no?”

“After all this today, you’re teasing me?”

“I would never do that,” he says solemnly, eyes still facing the road.

“Uchiha Sasuke!”

“Uchiha Sakura?”

Though it comes out as a question and he realizes his slip, she doesn’t protest. Pouting, she still doesn’t let go of his hand.

“Who knew you had jokes?” she says, putting her feet up on the dashboard. 

“Ah.”

“I’ll be back to dominating you soon enough. Frightening you, even.”

“I have no doubt.”

The remainder of the ride to the airport passes quickly, and they find themselves wandering the terminal, rolling along their suitcases with their free hands not quite so free, still holding on to one another. 

They gaze at the bright departure screens, rows and rows of other locations and other lives adorned with colorful logos, tagged with associated flight numbers. Even as the time ticks on to bring them closer to boarding, they remain stopped and staring so long a gate agent on the other side of the floor considers offering them assistance. 

Sakura sighs, wistful. “There’s something romantic about being in motion, chasing the sun.”

Sasuke eyes her sidelong. “Is that what you’re thinking about?”

“Sometimes I miss it.” 

A pause. 

“Where do you have to be?”

She turns to him, the afternoon sun caroming across the floor, waltzing with the curved terminal glass and transforming her jade eyes into jewels. As if they weren’t already.

“I guess nowhere, after all. You’re the closest thing to home.”

He releases her hand to dig into his pocket and pulls out what looks like a kerchief, which earns him a giggle.

“Oh, did I make you emotional?”

In response he holds it in front of her, asking for permission. She nods and he places the fabric over her eyes, knots it behind her head to blindfold her. Turns her body gently by the waist, keeping her steady. 

“Okay, what am I doing?”

“You choose, and we’ll go.”

She waves a hand in the air and points in the opposite direction of their luggage. “I have an old check-in sticker from my bag. Can you—?”

It takes him a moment to understand. Then he tears off the artifact from their outbound flight and presses it into her hand, the remnant stickiness adhering to her skin.

She sways gently, undecided, unseeing. Placing her hands on the screen, she taps her fingernails against it to orient herself and makes a noise under breath.

“Lift me.”

“Hm?”

“I need to be higher.” She bounces on her feet, and he knows she’s smiling.

Feeling a bit ridiculous, he wraps his arms around her hips and lifts her up as requested; she wobbles but touches the departures board with her palms.

With his head settled into the curve of her backside, though, he’s not _so_ mad about it. She can’t see him smile, either. Shy, private. 

She places the sticker on the screen. He lowers her to the ground, and she slips a finger under the blindfold to see their anticipated destination. Feeling him behind her, his hands untying the kerchief’s knot, she beams.

“Sasuke, I don’t think I’ve packed the right clothes.”

When his arm settles around her waist and his lips speak into her temple, she imagines him unraveling her day after month after year, scattershot in the way of galaxies, boundaryless, sparkling. 

“That’s one thing I can always fix.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Opening Lyrics: Hate Me (Sometimes) by Stand Atlantic 
> 
> This will probably be my last update of the year. While I haven't totaled up all the words I've put on paper (well, mostly word processor) this year altogether, between fic, NaNo, journals, etc, it's been a huge leap back into fanfic and writing in a whirlwind time in the world. And while I believe people write for themselves to some extent, and I do too, a lot of this isn't as fun without ya'll - so thank you.
> 
> I'd like to debut a new fic before the next chapter of this comes out. Maybe, idk, I don't follow my own schedules at all :D 
> 
> Gonna scurry away with my wine for now - Merry Christmas ✨
> 
> Twitter: [@psalloacappella](https://twitter.com/psalloacappella)


	13. XIII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Essentially,” Temari says, adopting a mockingly wise demeanor, “we’re all just fools falling in love.”
> 
> “Even if we see where it’s all going?”
> 
> “Especially if,” she says, draining her glass. “People in love don’t listen to their friends.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> everyone plays games, background pairings, Sakura runs the board

**XIII.**

_Now I've got a feeling that's cold in my bones  
_ _The pseudo-king sparks lies on his throne;  
_ _There's no heart, no moral, no regard —  
_ _The judgment swift, the cash cold and hard_

❦

  
  


A cascade, a cavalcade, a colonnade. A deluge in preparation of somehow containing their friends’ inevitable chaos.

_Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. Please leave a message —_

“This is getting ridiculous! Now yer phone doesn’t even ring. Call me back, bastard.”

Naruto wonders if voicemail boxes get “full” anymore; technology shifts at the speed of light and so does the heart. 

_Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. Please leave a message —_

“I don’t care where you went but you didn’t say anything! Typical asshole move. Ino’s worried too, ya know; Sakura isn’t answering either. Call back!”

In slippers and a stolen shirt, Ino leans on the counter in a bathroom that doesn’t belong to her and rubs her eyes with the heel of her hand. Lips puffy, tasting like that mellow, pastel scent of warm summer sun after spring advent — that first day after the equinox bleeds through on the turn of a new dawn.

Funny, that taste and soft emotion against the murk of night. Both mired in mutual guilt after the hour for their friends’ flight arrival came and hurtled by. They never deboarded. This was just a fix, temporary stress, she’ll justify to her inner. 

Everything’s a little blurry, her usual unflappable talent of waving off a hookup seeming a bit out of reach.

Glancing at the door, she lowers her voice on the voicemail recording, words slipping in the receiver under Naruto’s obnoxious din.

“You’re doing it again.” It’s a tone barely above a whisper, struggling in its neutrality. “Fading out, worrying your friends. Now you’ve just found someone similar to do it with. Cut the shit, Sakura.”

Setting her phone facedown, hard, on the cold marble counter, she tries to bottle the taste before it dissipates, like the salt air of the ocean, like sunflowers unfurling in low summer heat.

Leaning against the door, she listens to Naruto’s increasingly agitated jokes channeled into voicemails. She’s also unaware of his frantic texting:

_Are u dead? In a k-hole? Answer me!_

To Sakura:

_Noone’s heard from u since flight. Hope ur ok?_

Stricken by a sudden thought, ingenious or ridiculous and it doesn’t matter which, Naruto can’t pluck forth the right word for what he’s thinking of. E-something. E-late? E-lope, _ELOPE—!_

_Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. Please leave a message —_

“I hope yer not running away to get married! One, that’d be so cliché and two, what about _me?_ ”

Angrily thumbing the phone to hang up and try again, Naruto grumbles under his breath and starts yanking on pants. With a shift in — shit, he’s overdue, late, and Shikamaru’s going to be in the right this time, for once. Lazy leverage lost.

“It’s sooo like ‘im,” Naruto mutters, buttoning his shirt haphazardly with the phone crushed between his shoulder and his ear, “to do this shit. Bah, ‘I’m alone, I’m dark, I’m Sasukeee,’ then boom, asshole, runs away to fuckwhere with cute-girl. And I get it, but—”

_Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. Please leave a message —_

Groaning, he changes tack to leave one last chiding message:

“You’re obsessed, and you shoulda married her two weeks ago. You’re an idiot, too, but I’m worried. Don’t make me call you in as a missing person.” He pauses, realizing all his shirt buttons are married to the incorrect holes. “Also also . . . d’you think Sakura would be mad if super hypothetically _maybe_ I was interested in Ino? Not like I am or anything. Just a question.”

The response is the tone letting him know he’s run over, cutting off his last sentences. 

  
  
  
  


“He’s late,” Temari observes unnecessarily. 

Eyes cutting across the bar counter with a steely veneer, she watches her complicated person of interest flip a rag over his shoulder and fold his arms.

She can’t help but smirk.

“Yeah, well,” Shikamaru says, waving it away. “Things happen. Usually it’s me, so I guess I owe him this one.”

They share a significant look over the rim over her glass, and it’s uncanny how she seems to intuit situations in large part without him ever revealing details. He’s a bit guarded and she’s a little brusque, but they still fit together in something that feels like carved wood finding its destined groove. 

“In a panic, is he?” 

“And infatuated.”

Temari’s gulp is more than she anticipates, and she clears her throat while pressing fingers to her lips to wipe away an escaping drop. 

“This seems fun; your bar comes with its own mythology. Enlighten me.”

“Ehhh,” he waffles, avoiding her sharp eyes. Without looking at her: “It’s boring to tell all of it, but essentially Sasuke’s obsessed with Sakura, a stranger really, and I’m fairly sure as of yesterday Naruto’s involved with her best friend.” Pursing his lips in a manner oddly fussy, Temari snickers into her current sip and chokes again. Spatters liquid on the bar and on herself, to her dismay. 

Proffering the semi-filthy rag, there’s tight amusement toying with the side of his mouth. “And here I am, in the company of a princess and feeling like I’m missing a damn lot of chess moves.”

She obliges him a roll of her teal, bright eyes. 

“You’re not different, you know. What makes her such a stranger — which by the way, you hide your skepticism of her like total _shit —_ and me palatable for you?” Tossing the rag back at him, she smiles. “Snob. Head in the clouds. Isn’t that what drives you crazy about Uchiha?”

“What I see with you is what I get. That’s different.”

“Well let me enlighten you, Nara,” she teases, drawing out his surname, “lesson one: everyone has another layer, even if you don’t think so. Lesson two: be supportive of your friends, even if they do dumb things. They have stars in their eyes — it’s gross, I know. You’re too cool for that, are you?”

“He’s my friend.” Shikamaru crouches under the bar for a moment, busying himself with what she suspects is nonsense. “Naruto too. It all just feels a little too surreal, too neat. I’m not a big believer in coincidences, or fate.” 

“Too much thinking, not enough supporting. I have two brothers, they’ve both done some stupid things. Bad decisions are made and you have to catch ‘em when they stumble.”

“Dumb is one thing. Dangerous is another.”

“Essentially,” Temari says, adopting a mockingly wise demeanor, “we’re all just fools falling in love.”

“Even if we see where it’s all going?”

“Especially if,” she says, draining her glass. “People in love don’t listen to their friends.” 

Temari studies him for a moment as he removes his phone from his pocket, considers it as the screen alights, ready for him to interact. 

“You think you’re too smart to fall in love?” Grinning, she slides her empty glass across the bar; with his free hand Shikamaru intercepts it from falling off the edge with ease. “Then you’re sure no genius.”

The pointed word use feels poignant, a message cleaving hard and pugnacious from the skin.

Of course: Why would a woman with high status and ample information access not dig into his life? How fine the lines among politicians and titans in industry, more osmosis than web. The powerful run the board. And why wouldn’t she have her own questions on his apparent lack of ambition, not deigning to follow in his father’s footsteps?

Shikamaru opens a message chain of interchanging links and occasional paragraphs, the topics often of a scientific, medical, or competitive strategy sort. 

_This is my obligatory message to check on you. Kidding, but might be a good idea to charge your phone and let Ino know you’re all good. She’s worried._

Sends it, then adds the final thought in a separate line,

_Enjoy your trip._

“Did that assuage your guilty conscience?” Temari’s words prick as barbs but her smile is gentle, if amused.

Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura — Some dysfunctional troika now, each a celestial body exerting and repelling equal obsession and force. They fit together in their own odd way. But he can empathize with Sakura’s unique onus of precognition, which he suspects is what he sees in her eyes: 

A mind in constant motion and a soul always running crave respite. 

  
  
  
  


Glitz and glamour take center stage.

The heat of human bodies and relentless hot movement: A restless sense and spirit of its own, the moneyed rubbing souls with the seediest. 

One man with tousled red hair sits at a nearby bar with a scopic view of the gambling tables; at a slot machine across the floor, a woman with blonde pigtails and sharp eyes of almond shade.

They seem to triangulate a single target. Pink hair is far from the most vivid shade on the gambling floor, bright against chaotic moods. Hear, the vibrations of minds begging the stars to align, murmurs sprinkled with the occasional stealthy removal of those over their drinking limit, or out of chips, and the ping and song of slot machines.

For all her work to stay one step ahead of the pursuit of darkness, however, she’s been commanding a table for hours in plain view with a handsome man (pedigree family, they say) at her shoulder. Having surrendered his cards so long ago it’s difficult to ascertain the hour or the day, he looms with intensity, territorial, but still with a carefully-defined orbit around the object of his affection. She defines these gravitational loops, not the other way ‘round.

Eyes blazing like sea glass and in an emerald dress to match, Sakura tastes the drink on her tongue and watches the dealer for a moment, then gathers another large chip stack in her fingers and places it next to the original, substantial pot. 

She points. 

The dealer acknowledges her raise, and after more shuffling and tapping from the other players, the card round begins. 

Atmosphere, sharp. Blonde-pigtails camping at the slot machine purses her lips. 

The redhead remains impassive in expression, only deigning to twist a ring around his finger where it sits on his left thumb.

Cards are flipped, and the table erupts as Sakura wins the lot.

Beaming, she lets out a held breath, dizzy from the heady stake she placed. She collects herself, though, as Sasuke’s hand skims her bare shoulder to shift the pink curtain of her hair; his quick grip and release feels conspiratorial, a compliment. Straightening again and jewel-tone dress aglitter, she separates a section of chips and dips her head directly to the dealer with a smile, indicating his cut.

“You’ve upended this table,” Sasuke murmurs in her ear.

“Lucky me.” She says this skillfully out of the corner of her mouth. Lipstick shade a gentle peach, glossing away the movement of her lips.

“And where did you learn to gamble like that?”

“Oh, here, there, anywhere. Every town has a backroom game, you know, just a matter of finding the right person.”

She takes the hand Sasuke offers her, gets to her feet. Those two strangers’ sets of eyes burn brands into her cheek, their watchfulness a portent. 

“I spy an old friend.”

“They’re expecting you to collect. Did you already forget you’ve won?”

“I’m not so lush, or did _you_ forget that post-event hangover?”

“Sakura—”

“See if they’ll do the amount in cash, okay? And tip anyone necessary. I only know so many rules.”

Placing both hands on his tie, she runs her fingers over the well-stitched material and pulls him closer. He seems to float, barely rooted to the ground, watching her with eyes always dark and fierce. Before he can protest:

“You’re commanding when you want to be, hm? Authoritative. I think you can handle it.”

She glides away, fingers trailing off him and retreating, then rallies with intent. Picking up a more determined path as she proceeds through the casino floor, green eyes holding those of almond, feeling strung and taut between two distant points as her past reels her in and the present watches her with intensity, causing resistance. 

She knows he’s memorizing her as she goes, mapping all her contours. 

Blonde pigtails takes a proffered drink and folds the other arm underneath her ample chest, the red flush of drunkenness painting a butterfly shape across her nose and cheeks. Gesturing with the glass in her hand at the empty slot seat next to her, Sakura takes it and also accepts a gin for herself, leveling a significant look at her new — old? — friend. 

“You do know you need to tip them, Tsunade?”

Tsunade waggles her finger at Sakura, the corners of her mouth pulled down into a pout. By the sea of empties, it’s clear she’s way ahead of the waitress’s ability to keep up. 

“I don’t need lip from a wayward girl.” It’s a gentle barb, affectionate, and she follows it up with a finger-flick at Sakura’s long pink locks. “But you look grown now, and healthy. Not an awkward, lost young lady anymore.”

“Savvy, too. I could feel your eyes on me for the last two hours.”

Tsunade scoffs, draining another half a glass and fingers twitching toward the slot lever. “I’ve been watching you over there, with your handsome shadow. And I can see it in your eyes, that sharp edge. A shark in game and love.”

Sakura repeats _love_ under her breath in a dismissive sniff. 

“Saw him, too,” Sakura says, raising her eyebrows but not giving any other indication toward the red-haired man lingering at the bar. With oddly callow eyes at odds with his parlous appearance, he continues to nurse the same drink and occasionally fiddle with the ring on this thumb. “He hasn’t moved.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve had my eye on him too, the scrawny prick.”

Sakura chokes a little into her sip, suppressing a laugh.

“Where have you been roaming, Tsunade? Sometimes I could use your insight.” Smiling, she glances out over the casino floor. 

Tsunade watches her, hand moving again toward the slot lever.

“Oh, from one coast to another, on a boat or a train, moving among people without being known. The same things we’ve always done. Exist.”

Sakura has no answer for this, sighing at the slight lines around her mentor’s eyes. Slight for her age, anyway. No, she was much more than a mere guide for a lost girl who wasn’t used to how rough the world was, how little people would extend kindness, who didn’t know how to hide.

“I did do one thing,” Tsuande says suddenly, “a small thing.”

“Oh, go on then,” Sakura says, pointing at the slot lever. “Do it, your fidgeting is driving me crazy!”

With a cheeky drunk grin, Tsunade pulls the lever with a reverence often reserved for members of a strict church, finally receiving spiritual release. 

“Opened a hospital."

“No shit! Oh sorry, pardon, damn—”

“Sakura, you can curse in front of me now,” Tsunade says, one eye on the fast-turning slots, colorful icons a blur. The embarrassed bluster takes her back to a simpler time, a safer one, in retrospect. “Do you curse in front of him, your beau? Your escort? Dunno what you consider him.”

“How did you—”

“You think I’m old, dumb, or both?” 

_Ping._ A small icon of a toad, garish orange and a pipe dangling out the mouth, shudders into place and stops. 

“I—”

“Uchiha are easy to spot. They all have that look, don’t patronize your elders.”

“We’re just—”

Tsunade waves away her protests as dust. “Don’t pretend. You must also think I don’t read magazines, or keep in touch with old friends.”

“Old friends.” Sakura rolls her eyes. 

_Ping._ A coiled purple serpent with a dangerous crown of horns is the second icon to slam into place — no jackpot, anyway.

“Jiraiya always has the best tales for me. It’s why I still talk to the old lecher, come to think of it.”

Sakura frowns, summoning a memory from the depths of her mind of a drunk, loud, hanger-on she’d met briefly many years ago. Inebriated on liquor and on her mentor, earning himself a punch in the mouth by Tsunade in some dimly-lit dive . . . Sakura makes the connection and covers her mouth, remembering Hyuuga Neji’s event.

“Absolute vagabond shit,” Sakura mutters. “You two. Why don’t you cozy up with this stalker at the bar and compare notes.”

“Don’t be sassy,” Tsunade scolds. “You always need people watching your back. Well, friendly ones, not your baby-faced clinger over there.”

“Just what I need, more trouble.”

A pause. The slots sing round and round, but the third begins to slow. The whole machine, really, feels unbearably sluggish. 

“So there’s been others?”

Sakura doesn’t answer.

 _Ping._ A blue and white slug, slinging a spurt of acid, is the last icon to slam into place and complete the odd animal trio. Tinny, chiming tunes encourage the gambler to play again and again and again.

Tsunade ignores it.

“Watch your back, young lady,” she says quietly. “Powerful men are trouble, and you’ve always had a knack for somehow ending up with it.”

“Which, the men, or the trouble?”

The raise of her eyebrows suggests the answer is so obviously both.

“He’s different, you know.” Sakura’s voice is barely discernible over the casino din and raucous machines. “He’s a good man, whatever he comes from.”

Tsunade surveys her with a bit of skepticism: A girl turned woman, a little hardened and worn by circumstance, but still smart. She considers herself and feels that type of love has only seduced her once, the loss of it enough for a lifetime.

“And if you lose him?”

“I’ve been honest, that this isn’t forever. That it can’t be.”

“And if he loses himself for you?”

She knows where Tsunade’s questions come from, care and concern germinating from the soil of her own hard life; a woman that loses a gentle soulmate, taken too soon, strung up and tangled in endless guilt.

Tsunade doesn’t wait for an answer.

“If you ever need something in the future, call on me. I’m out west now.”

“Out west?”

“The hospital. It’s mine, actually. Felt like I should try to cultivate purpose, or something. I don’t attach my face to it, but—”

“But you should,” Sakura insists, taking her hand. “You have no reason to hide. You’re too brilliant for that.”

“I would say the same to you. I mean it, call on me. If you need me. Even if you don’t.” Tsunade pauses. “If you get tired of running.”

They share this moment in the smoky casino, knowing how much and how little can be discussed when hidden in plain sight. Seemingly infrangible curses settling between them, the type they’ve always shared which bonded them so tightly before. 

Tsunade breaks the silence first.

“How did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t! A lovely fated encounter.”

“Really, how did you?”

A pause. Sakura casts her eyes to the three kitschy slot icons, troika animals. Slot currency. “I’m just on vacation.

“You’re a better liar now, but still not with me, Sakura.”

Sakura stands, fingers trailing from Tsunade’s. The smile they share may last them two days or twenty years, so is the destiny of those always on the move. The former fixes her eyes on the redhead at the bar, turning away as she says in undertone,

“Having a good time, nothing more.”

Chill creeps into her chest as she departs but she presses it down, setting off across the casino floor again to cut a severe swath with her unshaken gait. Her new focus brings forth anger simmering under the skin, adrenaline, already on to the next encounter. That sadness will have to wait, indulged in private, compartmentalized: The lessons she’s learned before, useful for broken hearts and setting broken bones.

Placing her fingers on the bar, taking up a space next to the stranger, Sakura glances over her shoulder to see the slot seat resolutely abandoned. 

He signals a two-drink order, but ignores her. Lowering her guard, extending a peace offering? Posturing? 

“That’s an interesting piece,” she trills, eyes flickering to the ring and then to his gaze. They stare at one another for longer than strangers should; she catches the barest flinch in the corner of one of his eyes.

“Some type of heirloom, is it? A fashion statement? Criminal syndicate?” 

The last phrase drops casually, and he turns fully to her now, abandoning pretense as his elbow meets the bar and he drops his head into his palm.

“Girl, did I hear the last part quite right?”

“It’s familiar. The ring, I mean. Just curious who you pledge your allegiance to, that asks you to stalk young women.”

“‘Pledging’ is a weighted phrase. And incorrect.’”

“For an impatient man, you sure do a lot of watching and waiting. Your boss isn’t playing to your strengths.”

A strained, faint grin that produces more of a sneer; he turns away again.

Sakura’s eyes glitter in the smoky air.

“I see,” she says, glancing at the bartender, who sets two glasses down. “You’re disgruntled with your stakeout role. I could tell by all your fidgeting that you’re a man who likes to be moving.”

“I do wait for things that are interesting, even if tedious.”

“Tell your keeper I know people are following me. The club, my workplace.”

He doesn’t acknowledge this was his doing, but also doesn’t see the smugness she should. A man like this would want credit, edify his immorality. _Not him, then. His voice doesn’t fit._

Their heads are close, voices low. On the edge of violating one another’s space. 

“Oh, does ‘keeper’ bother you too? Should be your own boss, then,” Sakura adds, closing thin fingers around one of the glasses. He’s so close that they brush hands, his cold metal ring dragging across her hot skin. “Loyalty doesn’t seem to suit you.”

“We have that in common, then,” he murmurs, taking the other one. Tipping the glass edge toward her in a mild toast, he takes a swallow; she offers a sip with tight lips.

Frowns.

“Little girls,” she responds, “don’t owe anything to crime families and puppets. Not then, not now.”

“Then what are you doing here, seeking a mess, searching through old wreckage?”

Her lips twist. “You’re irritating. You’re used to manipulating, thinking people are beneath you. Got a name, puppeteer?”

A quiet scoff, and his eyes remain watching the back of the bar. 

“Sasori,” he finally says. 

Sakura shifts in her seat. The chances of him being even distantly involved in the Sand oil syndicate are high, which opens up a terrifying ocean of inquiry both deep and dark. It would behoove her to pick the brains of Shikamaru or even Ino to see if they have any knowledge, however slight, from their government families. But she’s ahead of herself right now. 

She’s only on vacation.

A name swirls on her tongue and she tamps down the ripple of her temper, the urge to demand secrets of him and force him to speak. _Don’t overplay your hand — they’re likely not related._

Still, there’s a shadow on him that’s too familiar. 

Glimpsing the visitor’s book under the nose of a smitten guard had been child’s play. Name branded in the soft tissue of her brain, easy to commit to memory. Linked to nothing, at present, that she knows.

_Tobi._

“Well, Sasori,” she says, setting her glass down with a sharp sound, “tell your keeper to let you find more interesting targets. Or find better prospects yourself. There’s a casino full of them.”

She stands, smoothing her emerald dress down over her thigh; it shimmers as undulating waves. Gentle collarbone slopes beckoning in the dim. Fingers coming forward and for a moment his eyes rivet to them, watching her hand approach — 

— she tips her glass over, liquid pooling on the wood in an abstract omen creating prophecies where there are none.

There’s a steady drip as it crests the edge and begins to soak the carpet.

“And . . . try harder, the next time you want to poison me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Opening song: Wide Awake - Hot Milk
> 
> [Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3bfpEkt00vMFkzyZI27jMi)
> 
> This felt a little shorter but there's a lot to unpack so lay it on me


End file.
